I'm trying to put this on the tail end of tech week so here goes. I'm wanting to try my hand at welding but I have no experience except for that 3 week stint in high school applied skills class which involved cooking and sewing too. But anyways, I don't really understand the differences between MIG, TIG and the other types of welding. I was wondering if someone could breifly tell me what they are and then if someone could reccomend a good inexpensive welder that I should buy until I get better at it and fork out some real money for a quality one. Something along those lines and any other information would be very helpful. Thanks
deuce, MIG welding is where you have a hand held 'nozzle' that feeds thin wire thru the middle, from a roll, and electric power comes down round the wire to form the welding arc. it also has gas (argon) that comes out round the outside of the wire to keep the dirty atmosphere and oxygen away from the weld. It's very useful for general welding and also thin body work. TIG uses a fixed tungsten tip, in a similar type of handset, that forms the welding heat by jumping an electric arc across from the tip to the workpiece. It too has gas flowing out around it. This type of welding you have to handfeed a wire into the weld. Tig is more precise and controlable than Mig. Arc welding uses a welding rod held in a hand set, and power comes down the rod to form the weld, and the rod melts away into the weld. The rod is usually 2.5 to 3.2 mm think, for most uses, and about a foor or so long. It has no gas but is coated with 'flux' that melts off as you weld, to protect the weld again. Not the best description, but it'll give you some idea until others chime in Paul.
morrisman's put most of it in there, though he did miss gas welding, which is where you use an oxy torch (a blowtorch with a very hot, but controllable flame) to heat up the job, and like TIG, hand feed a wire into the "puddle" to weld the two parts together. the best choice of welder for you depends completely on what you want to do with it... if you want a good all round welder, that's easy to use, and pretty idiot proof, you can't go past a MIG. i'm an idiot, and i've got one, and i can weld shit with it! it's fast, you feel fairly proficient after only a day or so of practice, and you don't need to use it ALL the time to be able to pick it up and weld something with confidence. also allows you to do everything from bodywork to structural stuff. ARC welding is cheaper, but less user friendly, and limited to heavier guage work (ie, no panel work with 'em...) oxy welding is an art, and where after a day of practice with a MIG i was happily welding away, my day of oxy-welding ended with a whole lot of melted scrap. i'm not saying it can't be done, and certainly once you've got the hang of it the results are much better (with much more workable welds), but i just sucked at it. i think it would be fair to say that it's a harder form of welding than MIG, though the setup costs are fairly minimal, and if you DO practice a lot and you DO get good, you'll be laughing. and you'll have a torch which allows you to weld, heat AND cut, which a MIG certainly won't do for you... as for TIG, go to the user list and look up "BFTWCS", sean has posted about a billion tips of TIG in the past week or so. finally, you may be interested to look up "henrob", either in google or in the search function here. it's an oxy torch, but one that people rave about, and my next major tool purchase. hmmm, christmas is coming up, and i just inherited some money... good luck with it dude...
Whatever you choose, if your doing sheet metalwork, learn to gas weld! I've mig welded for 30 years doing collision repair.(I hadn't gas welded for almost that long) After advice from this board I took up gas welding again. Now I rarely touch sheet metal with a mig. Once you'e got gas welding down, learning to hammer weld is not that tuff. And yes the Henrob torch rocks!
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