Welding Tips and Tricks

Hey everyone. I’m new to the forum and looking for some advice. I’ve been playing around with a Millermatic 211 for some time now and recently sold it. I would like to get into pipe welding and use it for my work. My father and I own a small plumbing/hvac company. We do a fairly large amount of low pressure steam work. I want to learn how to weld pipe and get certified to use my skills on the job. We mostly do threaded steel pipe but would like to be able to weld some of the jobs. My question is the Miller Maxstar 161 STH a good welder to start with? My work will take place at my shop which has 240v available and also in the field. We will be dealing with mostly schedule 40 steel pipe. I was also debating getting an Everlast PowerTIG 210 just to possibly be able to do aluminum in the future. I’m trying to get started with roughly $2k and I know the Maxstar will be a little over that but is very portable. Any advice from you guys would be appreciated.

I used a miller 150 stl. For a small welder on my work truck for pipe work for a long time. If your welding with it weekly and not daily, and mostly on 220v. Then you’ll get years of service out of a machine that size.

The Everlast powertig 210 won't run E6010 electodes if that is something that you're interested in for your pipe welding. The Miller maxstar 161 will run them, as well as other esab welders. The HTP Inverarc 200TLP runs them as well.

Has anyone run the Everlast 161 sth which seems to be the Maxstar equivalent? The price is considerably cheaper and I won’t be welding all the time with it. Also I keep reading stories of the Maxstar boards going bad so is it worth it to spend that much in it?


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The max star is worth it. I’ve burnt up two machines at work. By the time they cooked the board they had paid for themselves twice over. The cost of replacing the board is about 60% of replacement of the machine. So everyone gets a new machine with warranty. After cooking two they made enough money that they ok’ed me upgrading to a maxstar 210 with high freq.

Thanks Poland. I’m going to look into the Maxstar 161 with high freq and see what kind of deal I can get


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+1 with Poland.
I run blue so I might be biased. But I will say this- I haven't noticed anyone saying they use green professionally to make their bread and butter and they love it because they are so good. Not saying these people are not out there, I've just never heard or met them. Usually they are using blue, red, yellow etc - trusted big brand names from bricks and mortar LWS and local service available.
Buy once, cry once.
Just saying.

If your learning to pipe weld . You do not need high frequency. And pretty much all welding done in the field will be done with lift arc . It's a an entirely different animal to weld pipe with a foot pedal. The max stars are great machines . And the high frequency machines can be ran in lift arc tig mode which is what 90% of the time you will be using on pipe code work unless pre fabbing pipe for the field .

I actually just purchased the Everlast powerarc300 . With a price tag of 679 shipped. It dosent have ever feature the modern inverters have . But it has the bare minimum I need for welding pipe , in both stick / tig function. It can run on 1/3 phase power and has a duty cycle of 60% at 300 amps .

Goodluck I was in your shoes for a couple months trying to decide what i wanted to get the market is saturated .

Also some other good options maybe if you are interested in used . Miller xmt 350s and lincoln invertec 275s

Both are very capable machines and are used in the pipe trade for everything other then aluminum welding .

Good luck .

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Hi freq start is my preferred method everywhere including site. I have a button switch strapped to my torches. I can manually pulse with it if getting too hot and I ramp down to stop rather than snapping out which I'm not in favour of.
I can still select lift start and I do occasionally so it's good to have both.

I prefer the 210 max. It’s a much more versatile machine for pipe and structural. Ive ran the older 200 max and the newer 210 max quite a bit and have nothing bad to say. We had a 150 max there on one job and it never got used. Everyone went with the 210.

The small max stars don’t have high freq, or at least they didn’t. My 210 does. Yes most pipe field work is done with scratch start, and it is much different than high freq starts. Plus the newer 210 I got runs on anything from 120v 1pz to 480 3pz.

I’m not sure on the newer 160’s but the older 150’s you could get those in 3 different versions. A 150s (stick only), a 150STL (stick and lift start tig) and a 150 STH (stick and HF tig).


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What I never liked about the 150max machines is when running on 120v power, a 15 amp 120v power supply will only allow the welder to put out 70 amps max of weld power. That’s pretty useless, wont even allow proper operation of a 3/32 7018 rod.
On a 20 amp 120v power supply, the machine will put out 90 amps max of weld power. Atleast that will run a 3/32 7018 rod.

snoeproe wrote:What I never liked about the 150max machines is when running on 120v power, a 15 amp 120v power supply will only allow the welder to put out 70 amps max of weld power. That’s pretty useless, wont even allow proper operation of a 3/32 7018 rod.
On a 20 amp 120v power supply, the machine will put out 90 amps max of weld power. Atleast that will run a 3/32 7018 rod.

With a short enough arc length, you can get even more amperage depending how efficient the welder is. I hooked up my 240V stick welder to a step-down converter and measured the amperage consumption at the 120V outlet to include the consumption by the converter, and with a short enough arc, you can get 90A while consuming 15-16A. Could probably get another 15A without going too much over 20A. But that's with my welder.

I don’t waste my time trying to stick weld with 120v. Especially if I was doing pipe or structural. Not a good plan.

You talk about tight arcs....McGyver welded with a car battery and jumper cables.

Always wanted to try that

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I have a maxstar 150stl.

On 120 and 240 you can utilize full TIG capabilities. I'd guess 240 is "better" and I normally run it on 240 now that I have the service, but I ran it on 120 for a few years and never noticed the difference (mostly sheet metal at that time).

The 150 is older than the 161. Maxstar 150 STL/STH has the foot pedal port so you can get a nice SSC for around $150 on ebay and do pretty much anything with it. I love mine highly recommend.

That being said, if I were to do it again I'd get high freq for the type of stuff I do, but don't let that stop you. A lot of good work can be done with lift and a pedal.

The closest I weld to pipe is pie cut tubing and lift arc is fine as long as you have the pedal to cut the arc and keep the post flow going. Best thing about lift and a pedal is that you can re apply the pedal for as long as post flow as you want with out the arc kicking back on.

120V can run a 7018 3/32 but you NEED 240 for 1/8. I would recommend getting 240V for stick or just jump to a 210A machine since you might need the amps anyways running pipe.