Welding Tips and Tricks

This sounds like a strange question but is having Tig and stick welding good enough, or is not having a mig welding going to be problematic? I do realize it is kind of an open-ended question because this is very application specific.

I am aware tig welding is slower, but you do end up spending a lot of time cleaning up and preparing the metal than welding.

You're right - a very application specific question.

I have a combined Tig/Stick/Plasma machine and I've never yet found myself wanting a Mig. It always seems to me that Mig is great when you have a large quantity of work that you need to do very quickly - almost never the case with me.

I deal a lot with small parts, thin gauge aluminium, mild steel and stainless - for which I use Tig.

And I've found thus far that the couple jobs where I've had to lay down a lot more weld, outdoors, on dirty material (fence uprights and repairs to a 6X4 trailer) the Stick welder did the job perfectly well.

Finally...just keeping a bottle of Argon costs me plenty, I don't feel the need to also have Mig argon mix to pay for!

Hope this helps,



kym

I really like having all three.

Sometimes speed is the answer - wire feed generally wins this one.
For cost savings I use 100% co2 instead of the mixed gas.

You could do absolutely all your welding with tig, and some people do - but everything does not need the precision of tig.

I almost always weld in my shop and not outside - so mig and tig get most of the work.

On old rusty stuff, I use stick sometimes. I've also defaulted to stick when I run out of wire and need to keep working.

To do what? At work Mig unless the part needs some special attention.

At home, tig is my first choice since it makes less smoke and sparks. Mig welding in shorts is not a great idea, but fine when tigging (at least the parts I do).

I have all three as well. But if I had only one it would be tig with AC and DC. Most tig machines you can stick off of any way. I bought my mig last.

For me......mig and tig.......depending on the application. Don't use stick very often. Tig is sometimes too slow over mig.

Another thing that tips the balance for me is that I have Tig and Stick combined in one machine that delivers great performance in both.

Would it be nice to have Mig now and then? Yes, but not so much that I'm about to buy a dedicated machine to get it covered.



Kym

Out of curiosity, can any of you point out a TIG machine that can't stick weld?

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http://www.weldingsuppliesfromioc.com/m ... aQodEzUMRQ

Won't stick. Without some modification.

Since the title of the post is "Lincoln Square Wave" I'll go out on a limb and guess that SirRage, the OP, is considering a purchase of this machine.

I was originally going to propose getting a MIG machine and a DC stick machine, then using the stick machine as a scratch start TIG. But if my guess about the Lincoln is correct, the scratch start wouldn't be able to weld aluminum since it's DC only.

Back to the OP's original question, I'm a hobbyist with both MIG and TIG (each is also stick). My shop is my garage, so whether I use MIG or TIG there is always some setup time involved before, and breakdown / put away afterwards. If SirRage's setup is similar, there's almost no difference in setup / put away time between MIG and TIG; if it's a hobby you enjoy then the few minutes extra prep time and extra weld time may be that much more shop time to enjoy.

Application specific, unless you limit what you do by refusing work, almost always morphs into "application everything"

So in my case, living in farm country where people destroy machinery, owning my own company that does service work all over the state where people break things, being on an R & D team for our parent company who does not have enough engineering experience, and last but not least, having lots of friends who either break or want to make things.....it goes on and on.

You decide what you want to weld and plan on feeding the addiction.

Heck I even have a micro-welder that will eventually be given to a religious order who want to manufacture jewelry and do metal / bronze casting. And I am elected to build the foundry and teach them how to use it. They also have asked for a 60 ft. metal bridge. Guess who got elected.

It is great fun and I learn something new almost every day.

You got to start somewhere. My first welder was given to me at around 12 yrs. old. A 15 amp Sears stick welder. I think I gave it away to some young lad.

Poland308 wrote:http://www.weldingsuppliesfromioc.com/m ... aQodEzUMRQ

Won't stick. Without some modification.

Dude, I can't zoom on the picture, but it appears that the torch is hardwired into the machine. Am I seeing that correctly?

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GreinTime wrote: Dude, I can't zoom on the picture, but it appears that the torch is hardwired into the machine. Am I seeing that correctly?

Looks like it yes:



Bye, Arno.

I can't remember for sure but I believe it is hard wired into the machine.

The torch and work clamp are hard wired. The foot pedal has an Ethernet type plug. I would take a pass on this machine. Squarewave 200 or an everlast machine would be more industry standard an do a wider range of work. I would bet money Miller is soon to discontinue or redesign the diversion machines real soon. They just release their multimatic 215 with color lcd screen and standard dinse connectors to compete with the Lincoln MP210, can't see why they wouldn't use that as a base to make a diversion 200. The MP215 with spoolgun for aluminum would probably be cheaper than the diversion too and it comes with electrode holder for stick.