The little migs like you get at TSC or HD or Lowes won't cut welding aluminum. Oh, you can buy the wire, find the pure Argon gas, but it ain't gonna hunt.
The problem with aluminum is two fold in a mig. First it's soft. That means the aluminum wire shaves off in the process of passing down the tube from the machine to the welding tip. That fills up, screws up, plugs up, the liner big time. This is compounded by the fact that the drive rollers chew the heck out of the soft aluminum.
Most production welding of aluminum is done via mig. But that's like comparing a Ranger pickemup to an eighteen wheeler just because the fall under the label of "truck".
I have some TWECO mig guns for aluminum. They're four foot long with water cooled heads, yup, aluminum runs hot. They are for big time migs, big time.
The alternative for mig welding aluminum and it works fine is a spool gun. But you have to have a decent power source, hundred and fifty amp plus mig two twenty volt. And plan on spending another eight hundred to a grand just for the spool gun.
Miller has a new machine out that comes with a spool gun and is a two hundred amp mig. It's about twenty two to twenty five hundred dollars.
You can get into heliarc pretty reasonable if you have a decent stick machine. All you need is a high frequency box and a scratch start torch along with some Argon. That's the best way to weld aluminum.
Henrob's torch will do aluminum. But the only thing I've seen it do decent is flat work.
The easiest for me is the spool gun. The funnest is the heliarc. The most frustrating was the Henrob.
If you go with one of the Miller or Lincoln products like Miller's Econotig keep in mind aluminum takes more heat--amps and if you're doing much work at all you're going to be at the machine's limits real quick.
Heliarc machine's don't go down much in value for a decent one. I guess because they rarely go on the market unless they're worn out.
But this year at one of my suppliers I was offered an ESAB two hundred and fifty machine that was last years big dog for less than eighteen hundred dollars. Last year it went for almost a grand more. So you might keep your ears and eyes wide open for such a deal. They are out there.
Good luck. And don't make the mistake most of us do in such endeavors. Don't underbuy only to find the only thing worse than not being able to do the work is to only to be able to half, er, uh, half, er, uh, half, er, uh, screw it up.
