learning to weld

SmileySteve said:

Good advice in the thread, have used stick , gasless mig, gas mig, etc and found all good just use the right ones for the right job.
End of the day, its practice and preference, but key is clean steel, if its still full of tin worm, half a mil thick it aint gonna weld, best case it will just vaporize.
Lots of cost effective units on he market, see if you can have a go on some mates units first, but migs gas or gasless tend to be easiest to get good results.
Having said that i cut my teeth on an old stick welder and after practice was able to weld Austin mini wing sections together....tediously slowly & carefully but it worked

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+1
helps if your location is known tho

Don't understand the knocking of gasless mig's, yes they give more splatter and are more expensive to run BUT given a windy location i.e. Snowdonia without a garage/shelter, then that method comes into it's own. Time & patience still gives a decent weld in conditions most welders would not consider working in ... just saying!

I bought a wolf gass/ gassless Mig welder from amazon. As I knew there would be a lot of welding this MOT. It is the best £140 Iv'e spent. saved me tons of money. I reckon around £900. It's just having the time to do it. I never welded before so I watched all I could on youtube. Listened to people on here. Then bought scrap bits from local guy who does gates. took 2 week welding all sorts of situations. upside down left right up down. Then just hacked away at the chassis. It was eather do it or scrap it. So I managed it. enjoyed it now finished it today ready for retest.
All you need is common sense. One little tip I learned is the longer away from the work you are the less hot the weld. This has got me out of trouble a couple of times as you can fill blow holes up easy and grind them down. I used flux core. But it does leave spatter. so I got some argon and used normal mig wire. which I found a vast improvement. Oh yea get yourself a full solar powered welding helmet. I paid £ 45 for mine amazon. It's a must have and works great. Dont forget a good pair of gauntlets.

gassless does have a place, but I would still prefer gas stuf