WELDING FOR THE BEGINNER

Recently I bought a Flux Cored Mig Welder, it is a Lotus brand and quite cheap P5,250 it comes with a free 250grm spool of welding wire and the company I bought it from gives a free 1kg spool worth P500 (Shopee) Co name, Far eastern hardware based in Iloilo 4 day delivery.
For anyone that wanted to have a go at welding this is the way to go, it is just that easy by the time you have used up the free 250grm spool you will be producing very good strong welds, unlike Arc welding you do not need to strike and Arc, just point and shoot.
Up till now we have used up 30kg spools of welding wire on this machine and it is still going strong replaced around 4 tips again very cheap and available everywhere. Other tools will be required; Welding helmet it does come with a free basic one, but a self darkening one is the best P1500, Grinder around P1500, various G clamps, cheap in Tops and Bottoms, source of metal Zenith Hardware they store all under cover, First project has to be? build a Table to weld on, at a later date you may want to add a Chop Saw, again I used the Lotus brand P6000 On Line, P10,000 in the DGTE hardware stores for the same model. So a basic set up is less than P10K and around 15K total to add a chop saw. If anyone does have an interest in this PM me and we can talk a bit more on the subject, I don't claim to be an expect and was given some tuition by a DIY welder that helped me a lot. Dave

 

Does it use Argon gas or is the wire the non Argon type?

You shouldn't really be going through tips. I get about a year out of them when I owned a workshop.

 

Flux cored non gas type, perhaps the reason for going through more tips as like Arc it is a bit sparky and the Welds have slag on them.

On a good day when all is going well (not often) we can use 2 x1kg spools a day and weld 10mtrs of engineered steel beams, in total over 8 weeks we have done 135 meters of welded steel engineered beams and pillars, 1kg of wire will give around 6 meters of continuous weld if you lay it on heavy, this is on steel of 5mm thickness, but our little cheap machine handles that well, none of the controls are to the limit, so it just may be possible to go even thicker than that? duty cycle is 60% as most of the cheap ones are? but up till now it has never overheated, I know very little about welding but enough to know that this is doing a good job and I highly recommend it.

 

Yeah reading back think it would have been because we mainly welded 0.6 - 1.0mm steel and with Argon so maybe the tips lasted a lot longer.

I would like to learn to Tig weld or even learn to weld Titanium.

 

Today I come across this same Mig Welder in City Hardware P10,450 double the price that I mentioned before and exactly the same machine

 

dave... how's the welder holding up? is that the Lotus LT200FCX ?

are the wire spools and tips available locally?

tnx...

 

Up till now we have used x 50 1kg spools of wire and the machine is still operating very well, just last week we were using it after it had lain idle for 2 months, I cannot tell you the model number at this time as I am not near my site at the moment, everything I have bought for it Tips shrouds are all available quite cheaply on line around P300 will get you 16 tips and 3 shrouds, perhaps it uses 1 tip every 10kg of wire and one new shroud after 30kg has passed through the machine, Far Eastern Hardware in Iloilo is the place to buy this and the delivery times from there are excellent only 4 to 5 days, 1kg of wire costs P500 sometimes FEH has specials on it and will give P50 off that price.
This machine had been used continuously for 3 months by my careless Pinoy workers, it was them that used all the 50kg of wire through this machine, but even they could not break it. Great piece of Kit