Welding

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deian

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Feb 5, 2013
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189
Location
Liverpool
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'01 W203 C200K Auto Estate
Hi all,

I'm thinking of buying a welder, not done any before, so I would like some advice ont he type to get for good general purpose welding, body work, exhausts, etc etc, I'm gonna learn over summer, get some pieces of metal, experiment a bit, and train myself up, and later on get certified. So I'd like to get a half decent machine that would do whatever I needed with cars, baring in mine the different metals, thicknesses, TIG MIG ARC, locations, strengths of welds needed for chassis stuff etc!

Money, not thought about it! But hundreds, not thousands.
Any advice? Thanks
 
I suggest you go on a few welding forums and post similar to get the best advice.

Youtube is a good resource too.

Personally I have a clarke 151TE mig welder, which from my rather inexperienced viewpoint at least seems like it was a reasonably good buy. On a 13 amp power supply you cant get anything too powerful anyway.

http://www.machinemart.co.uk/shop/product/details/151te-turbo-mig-welder
 
One of the better UK based forums is this one. Clicky

A wealth of knowledge and several stickies on how to start off. As for power supply, I have a 16 amp socket in my garage (mainly for the compressor) which was a very easy fix albeit by a qualified electrician mate. Electricity still scares me.

Allegedly the Clarke which Sp!ke mentions (above) are quite good, though I don't know enough about them to comment as I'm old school (Oxy-Acetylene) and if I do need any bits doing now I just pop round to my local garage. Because I'm old and lazy. :)
 
Not sure about liverpool, but in london there are a few places that do evening courses in welding.

I did a course a few years ago at the college of north west london. Took a few weeks at an evening a week, but in addition to learning how to handle an oxyacetylene welder, I also got some city and guilds points.

They also did mig/tig welding… and I'm tempted to go back for those, if only I had the time…

M.
 
Certified/coded is an often missunderstood term when it comes to welding- a giveaway is someone saying they are '6g coded' or whatever as 6G is a welding position not a 'welding code'. Certs aren't lifelong qualifications, just proof that a specific weld met a given standard. Nearly all of them are fairly job specific i.e. someone working in aerospace could end up with multiple certs (typically under CAA BCAR A8-10) for different welding processes/materials/joint configurations and not one of them would be applicable to say structural steel. Even when a given code is used in different areas the weld procedures/materials/joint types can make them non transferable
They expire in a year or two if you don't have proof that you're regularly working to that standard for example getting them 'restamped' after NDT on production welds. Even the more basic codes

Cliffnotes version on different welding processes... ARC (stick/MMA) not so useful on thin materials/automive work, more useful on site work as you don't need to lug a gas cylinder about. TIG is probably the most versatile thing out there aside from oxyfuel but typically the hardest to pick up- the odd person gets it fairly quickly, some never will. Pretty much anyone can pick up basic MIG fairly quickly and another potential bonus is speed, can lay down a lot metal compared with the others. Welding speed not the same thing as job speed though. One of the downsides when wanting to work with different materials is that different shielding gases are needed with MIG. Granted if snotting a stainless exhaust up with it a mild steel mix will physically work but for high quality work not so much. A different gas is needed again for aluminium and other non ferrous metals too. An AC/DC TIG on the other hand is capable of welding pretty much any flavour metal with just pure argon. A cheapnese one from a reputable source (customer service/warranty for when it breaks) is gonna run around 1k and up though. If welding aluminium/magnesium isn't on the list then a DC only TIG is a LOT cheaper and as a bonus any TIG also doubles as a stick welder- both processes are constant current whereas MIG is constant voltage

As Spinal i'd look about for an evening class first, they'll obviously supply everything (probably expect you to buy your own helmet though) and the consumables like gas, material etc and other tools needed soon eat a fair chunk. Especially when learning...
 
I was interested in welding as a hobby for some time and like you I was reading various forums on equipment, techniques, etc. Many ask the same question on how to start so it's covered quite extensively. One thing a lot of people are suggesting is taking a course in your local college. After registering my interest with an automotive college and waiting for almost a year for the course to begin it has finally started back in January. I'm half way through the course and enjoy every moment of it. It's a day a week course and runs from 9 to 4. I went with TIG and can honestly tell you, it would take me lots of time to achieve what we do there. Apart from theory and general knowledge, you definitely need someone who can give an advice there and then. As far as I know there's also an evening course available with some colleges if you can't do a day one.

Do it is all I can say.

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Sp!ke, there's some little mods you can do to the 151 to improve its performance - assuming you haven't already ;)

For now I've converted mine to run full size bottles, and changed out the earth clamp and leads to something much more substantial. If it's old enough to have a plastic wire liner, changing this to metal is also an idea.

I learned how to weld with oxy acetelene many moons ago and did start to learn TIG, but it's probably all forgotten now.
 
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