Anything welding

Try it, it will make a big difference. But what do I know

 

No black soot. Pic taken after removed from jig and placed on the floor with no cleaning

 

Impressive. That was welded with a spool gun?

 

This is very good advice. In not a fan of the machines with more dials and switches that you will ever use. My 20 year old mm250, which is an analog machine us much easier to adjust than the mm 252 that I use often at work. Dials are much easier than digital readout. If someone gave me a mm252, I could not sell it fast enough so I could buy a Hobart.

 

Don't get me wrong, the 252 is a great and powerful machine, and using a tapped machine does not bother me. You get used to using them both, it's just that a tapped machine will outlast a inverter machine any day of the week.

 

That was a spool gun. When building truss, I tack it all together with the tig, then spool gun it. It would take way to long to tig up all that truss. In my work, I mainly only use the tig to tack aluminum, and to do stainless work. I don't do offroad or car stuff anymore, if I did, I would use the tig more.

 

I guess it all comes down to what you feel comfortable with.

At my age I was a die Hard Transformer Rectifier machine person to be honest I was starting to weld just as Mig and Tig were within the reach of the smaller companies and welding shops

Now I love my Inverter machines and working on them know when the fail it can be so very expensive but there are ways to keep the costs some what limited

I must say if you don`t need all the options or take the time to understand them seems most times the users manual gets given to the purchasing agent never seen by the people on the floor . Most employees who won`t take the time to download the manual on their time.

Then you get into that some machines just work so much better on 3 phase although they are claimed to work on both single and 3 phase

If I had 3 phase at my Shop I would come up with an excuse to buy a Miller Pipe Worx 400 only @ $12,000.00

Then the other thing if it is a Hobby or if it feeds the family is a big difference

Hobart machines are a very good deal I have not owned one Since Hobart broke up

 

Miller owns Hobart. The ironman 230 and the miller 212 are the same machine wearing different clothes. The Hobart warranty is better then the miller warranty.

I can't afford a 10k tig welder.

The advantage of the inverter machine is that it is a powerful machine that takes less power and comes in a very small package.

Put a inverter machine in a shop environment with grinding dust and particles floating around, and it will have a failure long before a transformer machine.

Anyone looking for tips, watch Jody welding tips and tricks on YouTube. The guy knows what he is doing and explains things in a way that you understand what he is doing.

Now shut up and weld.

 

We need to distinguish professional machines from consumer machines. There's no reason an inverter machine will be any more or less reliable than a transformer machine but there are design criteria and price points that differentiate their reliability.

There is truth that things like LCD displays are more vulnerable to environments but overall IGBTs aren't any less rugged than a transformer (which also has very large SCRs in the rectifier, which are necessary to make the output a true square wave). Both machine types have lots of microelectronics that need to be made immune to a shop. A Precision TIG has a microprocessor on its main board anyway, so it's not really any less complex than anything else but you don't get the benefit of a modern switched mode power supply with things like adjustable frequency.

I have access to several Precision TIG 275 and 375 machines and the high frequency circuit can fail, which is why Lincoln goes to the lengths they do to pot the PCBs and seal them. But the Lincoln G3909-1 (now G4763-1 I think, the main PCB for a Precision TIG) costs alone as much as a whole Square Wave TIG 200 welder, so the quality and workmanship is going to be better as a result.

Indeed.

 

Speaking from my experience and experience of friends with shops. Every inverter machine I have ever had has issues in less then a year of use in a shop environment. Transformer machines zero issues.
How many old syncrowave and idealarc machines are still plugging along 30 years later with not an issue ?

 

I'm only familiar with the Syncrowaves and their reliability issue is generally traced to a tin whisker growth issue on their control board. Before going back to get my welding certifications my previous career was high reliability microelectronics, primarily in the aerospace and space world. I have an electrical engineering degree and my job was designing analog systems and switched mode power supplies for military and commercial satellites.

When Europe pushed to remove lead from electronics under RoHS everything started having trouble with the lead-free solders growing whiskers, it's a byproduct of electrochemistry, when you have a charge on tin it will create dendrites, it's literally making crystals. Even in a vacuum they will grow (such as space) and they are aggressive enough to push through conformal coatings (which is used to prevent the dust and metal powder from settling on the electronics). So the only way to prevent it is to pot the electronics, which isn't ideal because it's impossible to repair later and hinders heat transfer.

The blame isn't the high power side, it's the low voltage controllers. It's a case of blaming the wrong thing. It wouldn't have made any difference if the Syncrowave was transformer, the failure potential was there either way. It's unfortunate that the blame is being put on the inverter because there are significant advantages to switched mode over linear power supplies. The reason old transformer machines are reliable is that there's no trick things like adjustable frequency, unbalance, pulsing, high frequency units, etc. that require logic and microprocessors.

If they built an inverter that was just a 60Hz power supply it would run just as long, but there's no market for them without all the advanced features. The high power stuff is basically immune to tin whiskers because high voltage and high current tends to burn them off. But on the low power side they will eventually cause short circuits, there's not enough power to burn them off.

Lincoln made the Invertec and they are a solid power supply, although do suffer from some workmanship issues. Those are inverters that don't try to be too complex. The V160 is a solid unit, for example. They fail because their multi-voltage selection requires a relay that sticks. If you use it on 120V it will run forever or if the design used a jumper instead of trying to auto select the problem wouldn't exist at all.

If you want my honest opinion, it's that guys who designed welders for decades are now doing pretty sophisticated stuff that is beyond their experience and they are missing details. That or they are contracting out the design to generic design houses who don't know about industrial electronics and aren't designing for reliability in harsh environments.

 

@deog, I guess I should say in clarity that I don't disagree with you but think that there's advantages to inverters and taking care of them and cleaning them can help solve some of this.

 

I agree, and love how small and powerful they have become, and the welders now have so many settings, 90% of the people out there don't even know how to use them.

Like I said, if I could afford it, I would have a dynasty 350 with all the balls and whistles, but I would have to eat top ramen for a year to do that.

 

Might be worth it, the Ramen, but you might need some of this: https://www.packitgourmet.com/search.php?mode=search&page=1&keep_https=yes

 

Huh?

 

Sorry,one of Packitsgormets' products is called Ramen Rescue. I didn't realize that the home page would be displayed. I bought a couple of packages but haven't tried it yet.

 

Seems like the Hobart 210 shot up in price. $880 now. I thought I saw it for $799 last week

 

https://www.farmandfleet.com/produc...MIvsSp7vrW1gIVb77tCh3BrA9TEAQYASABEgIXsPD_BwE


Go to northern tool. They price matched this store above and I had a $50 off coupon.

 

Thanks!

 

Cut an access door in the firebox, played around w an idea for the latch, and tacked some reinforcement to the skid plate.

I had been super busy for a month or so but I’m starting to find time to play again.