110 Volt Mig welders, thickness of steel???

[Russel Nash]

Am I reading this chart correctly:

http://www.millerwelds.com/products/mig/onephase.php

That at most a 110 Volt mig welder should tackle is a quarter inch thick steel???

Most of them are only good for 3/16ths ?

Thanks!

[DougGuy]

That's in a single pass. There are tricks to welding thicker plate with one of those, but you'd need a torch to help it out by preheating the plate before you make a pass, and even then the duty cycle is only 20% and by the time you gave it the 80% cool down period between welds, your work would have cooled to the touch. Those things are good for welding muffler pipe and lawnmower decks and that's about it.

[theperfessor]

Russel, I'm no expert, but I think you are correct. Makes sense, w/240V you have twice the voltage at the same current, you get more power. Even with the new inverter welders there are still capacity limits. Just have to use multiple passes. The 110V welders are great for sheet metal and body work.

[Sweetpea]

Some of them will do 5/16...

For the vast majority of us, that is more than enough.

I'm no pro, but I did learn from one... (he taught many kids going way up north to work on the pipeline)

We built several trailers, and they have held up to years of abuse.

If you NEED to weld more than 5/16, you should probably have a pro do it anyways.

Brandon

[country gent]

For fine work and firearms I perfer tig to mig and definitly not the flux cored wire most of them use. For home repairs they are good. for a water tite weld to many slag inclusions for firearms work the wire is the wrong alloy to blend perfectly finished. I ahd a 110 volt miller with flux cored wire and it was good for intended purpose of home repairs. I have a miller wire welder with gas flux and capable of 1/2" thk steel works great. I can borrow a reel gun for aluminum and hard surface wire for jobs on the farm. Have access to a tig welder High requency and foot controled. I have weldede a stem onto 1/4" broken bolts to remove them. Pretty much any alloy wire is available for it. I have seen brass and bronze welded with it. But at the tme we made a bulk purchase on the miller 110v wire welders money was tight and it served very well for many years. To do it all over again I would buy it to start with. Most people dont do that much welding at home to justify the big set ups. In the tool room at work we had miller power pack and set up for Arc, mig and tig all in one unit. Almost everyting was pre heated in a furnace before welding. and slow cooled in the furnace afterwards. We had a very good welder and he taught me alot. He perfered a u shaped groove to the vee since there was no corner to get into. When you see a real welder doing fine work its apparent whats what. But then I still occasionally gas weld with the torch and cloths hanger wire. LOL

[Hogdaddy]

1/2 in steel can be welded with that welder.. First bevel both sides & run a few passes on each..

Prety easy,, got to be smarter than the material you are working with

H/D

[Russel Nash]

It's actually a work issue, specifically a millwright work issue. This younger guy (26) and is my foreman is telling me that on other jobs they use a 110 volt flux core wire welder for everything.

At home I have I have a Miller 180 autoset plugged into 220, and running argon/CO2 gas mix. Just last year like in August I got my very first welding certification, 3G, vertical up, on 3/8ths beveled plate with 7018 rods. Getting that first one was a real eye opener for me. You all have heard that saying "you don't know what you don't know". So getting my 3G I learned just how little I actually knew about welding, and how much more out is out there to learn.

long story short, these guys, I think, are taking shortcuts, won't listen to me, the only certified welder on the job, and I suspect I will be called to testify when things fail catastrophically.

[W.R.Buchanan]

I've had a Miller 130 wire feed welder for many years. I have ran it off the same 16 ga 50ft extension cord the whole time. It never even gets hot.

I have welded a considerable amount of my current Jeep project with it simply because I am welding to 1/8" thick tube and it has more than enough poop to do that. If I have to weld thicker material together I use my Heliarc.

Where you run into problems with a 110v welder is when trying to do too thick a material with it and not knowing how to layer passes. Really I wouldn't trust my life to welds made by this machine on thicker material, it simply does not have enough power to penetrate deeply enough for security. On stuff that doesn't matter I have no problem what so ever. I consider stuff that matters to be like hanging off a cliff on your winch cable. You really don't want the winch mount to give up in this situation! You get the idea.

This machine is supposed to have a 20% duty cycle. I have welded a continuous bead nearly 6 feet long with it several times and many 2 foot long continuous beads on gas tanks. The extension cord never gets hot, which would be your first indicator that you are pushing the machine. You have to use a high angle on the torch to insure good penetration and a weave pattern to insure good penetration on the edges of the weld.

If you understand the limitations of the machine these are good investments. Let me qualify that,,, Miller, Lincoln and Hobart are good investments. I don't know about Off brand welding equipment since I would never buy any of it. This is a place where second hand is better than second rate.

All that said, I have actively tried to trade in my 110 welder for a 220v welder of the same type. I have 220v single phase available in my shop and run my Heliarc on it. However since I can't get the local welding supply's to give my good enough trade in for my existing unit I'll probaly just end up keeping it, since I've already had it for 20 years now any way.

But You should know that as soon as my Jeep is done I will be building a small offroad teardrop type trailer to pull behind my Jeep. The entire frame work of square tubing will be welded together with this machine. The high stress points like the tongue and axle assemblies will be heliarced since they are the places that really matter, but the rest will be MIG'd with a Miller 130, and I have complete confidence that will be better than adequate. stay tuned.

See Jeep project at http://www.4btswaps.com/forum/showth...he-Descrambler

If you sign up you can view the more than 400 pics of the project and see the many places where I welded with this 110v welder.

With the 110v welder you just have to choose your battles.

Russle Nash: I was a Millwright for many years. I was LA certified. We had two sayings for dealing with "substandard work."

"Them Budwieser cans will never know the difference," and my personal favorite ,,,"You can't see it from the freeway."

Unless you have to sign off on it, just do your best and leave. If you have to sign off on it, then insist on doing it right or drag up. No job is worth going to jail over.

Randy

[Russel Nash]

Whewie! Good thing for plant engineers. The engineers set them straight on a few things.

My foreman is still an idiot. He was running around with the 110 Volt wire welder when all of a sudden it quit working. It was getting all sorts of flustered when I finally clued him in about "duty cycle".

[theperfessor]

Some people are clueless, aren't they...

[Russel Nash]

Yay! that job is over with.

I thought the foreman (again, 26 years old) was going to have a fist-to-cuffs with another one of us worker bee's or "drones" (age 46) on Wednesday.

Ego really is an amazing thing. The 46 year old had some really good ideas on how to do things quicker or easier but because the foreman or super hadn't thought of them, those ideas were ignored.

These were forced draft fans (centrifugal) we were working on, 3 of them total, which forced air to that unit's boiler. I'd say the fan's rotor with its buckets weighed at least 5 tons, and spun at 1,080 RPMs.

The foreman dragged that wire welder into the fan and was tacking hex nuts to their bolts. See, the things vibrate so much, the nuts would vibrate right off. He was actually missing where he was supposed to be tacking, so I had to go behind him with the stick welder and really tack them. I had some other stuff I had to weld too. Turns out what I was welding to was actually AR360 steel. So the plant engineer came down with the emails from the fan manufacture which said to preheat it to 250* F.

That part of the plan had not gotten to me before I started welding on the first fan. So the plant engineer put on a tyvek suit, climbed into the fan and all around the rotor to MPI my welds. They alll passes.

[10-x]

Welded for about 30 years, at work used Professional welders, stick, MIG or TIG all 240 VAC .Certified a few times when needed. Bought a 120VAC gas MIG one 25 years ago for home projects, 1/4" or less, works fine, have to know the limitations.