Welding Tips and Tricks

We used this combo at tech school for mig and flux core welding, but why the cost. Why does the wire feeder cost just as much as the power source. Labor to program settings?

wire feeder:
http://www.lincolnelectric.com/en-us/Eq ... nElectric)

Power source:
http://www.lincolnelectric.com/en-us/eq ... nElectric)

I'm not getting anything from the links but a generic "show product->select all" page.

PeteM wrote:I'm not getting anything from the links but a generic "show product->select all" page.

In the url, just delete the "(LincolnElectric" bit at the end.

List price can often be very different than actual sale price. The shop bought a Lincon 210mp just after I bought mine. I asked the fab shop Forman what they gave for it. It was about 30% cheaper than the cheapest place I could find.

You also have to remember once you step up into a two piece set up for mig that you are getting two machines. And they are built heavier to handle higher duty cycles and industrial use & abuse. They often come with more parts that are designed to be replaced or rebuilt not just thrown away when worn.

Those, and pretty much all heavy industrial machines, are built to run 24/7 for as long as possible and tolerate use and abuse that would leave consumer grade products in the scrap pile.Building stuff that durable and accurate is very expensive. I've worked on some of the projects to develop machines that are currently in use and there are thousands of hours of engineering and testing that go into what seem like relatively simple things.

Yeah I know what you mean pete. Every once in awhile I'll look around at machines and look at the pipeworx 400. 400 amps for mig at 100% duty cycle. A 211 can put out 60% duty cycle at max amperage I think or around there. And then it pulses and does all the other crazy stuff that I can barely wrap my head around. Hear engineers who design welders sure know a lot about electronics. I have issues just thinking about the different AC wave forms. Triangle and square really wracks my brain... Probably just because my calculus brain can't figure out a formula to make it that way.

Farmwelding wrote:Yeah I know what you mean pete. Every once in awhile I'll look around at machines and look at the pipeworx 400. 400 amps for mig at 100% duty cycle. A 211 can put out 60% duty cycle at max amperage I think or around there. And then it pulses and does all the other crazy stuff that I can barely wrap my head around. Hear engineers who design welders sure know a lot about electronics. I have issues just thinking about the different AC wave forms. Triangle and square really wracks my brain... Probably just because my calculus brain can't figure out a formula to make it that way.

Yeah. I felt way out classed in that environment. The head engineer has 2 PhDs, and the second has his bachelors from Penn State and masters from CMU, and a mechanical engineer with god knows what.

But hey, somebody has to turn on the shield gas and attach the high freq. clip when they're developing a laser guided welding robot.I ran one of those pipeworx for a while a couple of years ago when a company I was with bought like 10 or 11 new ones. Man, that thing was like magic doing downhill roots on stainless pipe.