Thermal Arc Fabricator 3 IN 1

[Ron Sutton]

Greg made a good point about combination welders.

When I was a wee lad of 19, starting my first chassis shop business in 1982, I needed a MIG welder & a TIG welder. I was short on money ... and short on experience buying equipment.

I bought a "combination MIG/TIG/ARC welder."

It could do all 3 ... poor to moderately ... but none of them well. In short order I had to buy a dedicated quality MIG welder & a dedicated quality TIG welder. I later sold the combo welder for pennies on the dollar.

What I got out of the experience was wasted money, time delays and an education.

[darrinf]

I have the 181i and it works fine for what I'm doing. If I were doing a lot of fab work I'd have gotten a higher quality Miller MIG and perhaps a dedicated TIG as well. I needed a machine to do light fab on my project, including welding a bracket to the firewall, patching the tunnel - which are both thin gauge material, made my own trans crossmember and welded brackets on the rearend housing. Basically nothing over 1/4" thick and all carbon steel. I do plan to weld my stainless exhaust so the TIG function is nice. I do agree with all the comments about getting what you pay for. If I wanted to spend a few thousand on a high quality welder I would have, certainly nothing wrong with that. Of course I did have to fix the wire feed already - one of the gears is pressed on to a knurled shaft, and the gear started slipping. Other than that it's worked fine.

[Revved]

Originally Posted by GregWeld

To me ARC welding capability is like my Gas welding set up.... the only time it ever gets used is to heat something I need to bend. Weld with it? WTF would I want to do that for? LOL

I have always wondered why they keep the ARC capability on those welders... I guess everyone needs pipe fences but I would think that MIG would be so much more efficient at this point.

One interesting thing I learned up at Mark Gerish's Metal Shaping Academy is that many old school panel beaters prefer gas when they have to weld on aluminum panels they are fabricating because TIG keeps the heat so close to the weld that the metal becomes brittle relative to the rest of the metal and is more prone to cracking when working the panel. Gas welding apparently distributes the heat more evenly and this isn't an issue.