Hey mperdue

I was looking at your site (and wincing at your rust) when I noticed that you were having a go at gasless MIG welding.

I thought I might be able to offer a bit of advice. I've been successfully MIG welding for about four years now.

I've never tried a gasless MIG as the wire is so expensive it seemed to make more sense to pay for gas, and I'm told it's a lot easier to weld with gas.

I started to try and learn on a little machine like the one you describe and hated it. It may have just been my particular machine but I could not get a half decent weld out of it. I concluded that MIG welding wasn't for me and I reached for the old oxy torch. Then my dad bought a decent UniMIG which I had a play with and discovered it was much easier than the little machine, and I could get good welds out of it, but not all the time. I decided to sign up for night course and after eight weeks I could do welds I was proud of! Now I've bought a Kempii welder and couldn't do without it. It even came in handy with my bathroom renovations!

The morals were:

* do a course - don't try and teach yourself - a local tech college will be the go here.

* buy/rent/borrow/<please don't steal> a good welder and use gas.

Hope this helps, good luck!

No worries Michael,

I see your point about the $$$. I still highly recommend going on a course at some point. I couldn't believe the difference it made to my welding!

Another thing, when welding sheet metal you get much better results by setting the voltage high and welding one dot at a time to create a series of stitch welds (ie press the trigger for one second, wait a second or two for the steel to cool down a little, then weld another dot overlapping the last one and so on...). I usually overlap the steel if it isn't an overly visible area and weld in about one inch stitches about one inch apart:

----------********----------********----------********

Then a good dob of seam sealer to finish off.

Once again, good luck!