Harbor Freight Welder deal..?

[Mark @ Everlast]

Gale,

I am a trained welder, work for myself on the side in fabrication, worked on welding crews, have a background in agricultural education, and work for Everlast, not only selling welders but "improving" them as well. I always have to walk a careful line in recommending/discussing welding...When you talk with guys on a daily basis that are new to welding, you find out that there are a lot of "misconceptions" about welding...like everyone can be a tig welder in a day.

Reminds me of the time a customer called and said his TIG welder wasn't working and it was brand new and he wanted to send it back. I said, lets figure out what might be wrong first. But he was insistent there was something wrong with the machine....Finally, I was able to ask him what kind of tungsten he was using (as using the wrong tungsten for AC in inverter welders is a common issue). He asked, "Whats Tungsten?" Yep you guessed it: He had been using his tig torch without tungsten!!

 

[2manyrocks]

thanks for the input on using the Lincoln AC/DC tombstone for tig. Will have to look further into why Lincoln doesn't recommend it.

 

[Mark @ Everlast]

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This is their recommedation page. I'd hazard a guess that the duty cycle at 125 amps is so low that they don't feel that it will support TIG welding. I would think it would be hard on the rectifiers as I know some of them have given problems. Don't get me wrong. Its a fine machine for limited shop repair/ farm welding with stick. But its not designed to handle the demands of tig, even though it might be possible for brief sessions.