Anything welding

i don't have any room to critique.

i left my welding hood at work, and this morning had a line on some scrap steel for my trailer build, but i needed to use the trailer to get it, and the trailer had some welds cracking away on the metal bars that attached the leaf springs to the frame. couldn't trust it to safely carry anything any distance. even better, i never cleaned up the trailer, so it's firmly coated in rust, moss, and paint, and it's been raining the last 2 days here...

so i shut my eyes, and welded. it came out looking only slightly better than that... it'll hold, but it sure don't look pretty!(hf has auto-darkening helmets for $35 on christmas sale, picked one up later today)

most disappointing part is the guy responded and backed out of the deal by the time i finished it and was ready to leave the house...

 

Sucks about the scrap but uhm...left your hood at work?!

What welder has only one hood

 

i actually have 2 at work now. now i've got 3, and no money!
the nice vulcan and 'goggles'. they paid for themselves in a few tight spaces. one coworker also has used them for batman skits he makes up ad-lib, which is also entirely worth it.

$40 Meonum Auto Darkening Welding Goggles, Wide Rang Shade 4/5-9/9-13, Welding Glasses with Welder Mask and 10 Replacement Lenses, Adjustable Sensitivity work for TIG MIG ARC Plasma Cutting

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CLH13XHQ?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details

and now the home mask is this i mean, $35 for auto darkening is almost impossible to beat. i can't understand why anyone would use a fixed shade helmet anymore...

i'm also officially broke for the rest of the week, finally picked up a filled 75/25 tank to start mig welding at home as well. flux core was fun to play around with, but it rolls out too much smoke for me to try to get a decent weld out of!

 

So, I'm going to say this in the most neutral manner possible cause "hood brands" is borderline "what's the best tire" so..

I chose a "premium" hood because I wanted something from a company that's been around for a long time as reliability is important to me.

I've already been flashed when TIG welding when I tried an associate's Vulcan, and another one's Yeswelder.

So, I've never owned either of the above mentioned, but those experiences lead me straight to Lincoln.

I do like the Miller's Digital Infinity as well but I don't care for their method of 'darkening' plus Lincoln came in my favorite color.

 

i get it. i've also never used a more premium hood either. so some of it is my own ignorance. maybe later on, i'll change to something a little more official. i'm slowly building my setup. was window shopping primeweld again last night...

 

Owned 4 of their machines, none of them have ever skipped a beat.

 

I'm no longer a hood elitist.

My 1st auto shade was a harbor freight unit. It served me good for 15 years. The suspension gave out so believed what I read on the Internet and sprung for a Miller Elite.

It has a nice suspension and came with an ass load of consumables. I'm not sold that the Elite is $200 better than the HF.

I do know when I knock the Elite hood off my head, I worry it's gonna make an expensive noise. I don't have that worry with the HF unit.

I do what to grab a set of those welding goggles, though. Been meaning to do get some for years.

 

Elitest would be the $1k hoods

In defense of the non-premium hoods, I haven't had one flash me with MIG welding (I've had the chance to try them multiple times from others I've shown how to weld at my house)

It was TIG where I got flashed with the two mentioned

 

shoulda' put it on your christmas list! 2 biggest downfalls of them is that there's an on/off switch on the side, and they like to try to cut into my big nose until they're adjusted almost loose.

they end up much looser than i would normally run any set of googles, but the field of view is better than that of any 'large' auto darkening hoods due to the goggle design.

with the on/off switch, you must always turn them off to preserve battery between uses. and compared to all the other always-on hoods, you're guaranteed to flash yourself the first couple times forgetting to turn it on!

 

yea, but i've already dumped nearly $600 on welding and shop gear this weekend already. i'm not ready for another $600 for at least a few weeks!

 

Christmas list my dude!

Good thing is, we're not talking red or blue.

That's instantly $1500 or more!

 

unless you're offering, all the people my christmas list goes out to max out at $50, with most preferring items under $20!

of course, i made all my Amazon lists public(all 43 of them!), so here's to hoping one of those secret millionaires comes along and just ships me everything off the lists!

 

Lol you gotta be your own Santa sometimes

 

Can you run the F360 app on that?

 

My dude, I'm way ahead of you

 

Awesome!

I want to get better at using the tablet.

 

when my siblings and i were younger, it was a common occurrence for my parents to threaten us with giving us a lump of coal for christmas if we weren't good. when we were really young, it worked, so they just rolled with it.

but then we got older, and they kept the same tactics. then i came to the realization that coal can be used for heat, and we went camping often, in every season except winter.

so i assembled the siblings, and one year made all them aware that coal could be used for better/hotter campfires. so we all asked for coal.

we didn't get any(can you even buy a lump of coal anymore?), and the youngest sibling was disappointed. parents were a little frustrated i used their threat against them...

but they never used the threat again!

 

I'd want to get Wacom (second hand of course) for drawing as I used to be somewhat artistic. Would be awesome to turn a drawing into an SVG for cutting.

 

It's been a while, but I thought the Design Space for the Cricut die cutters could turn pics and drawings into SVG.

Doesn't F360 allow importing of SVG's?