Hagen Brothers farms,Goodrich ND | Our first wire welder was a little 120V with 90 and 120 amp output Century brand welder. Like you, we needed something to weld light steel without burning through. All the heavy welding was done with an old Lincoln "tomb stone" AC/DC "stick" welder. We found this little Century wire welder cheap at a warranty return and damaged / parts missing store for $75. It had the gas kit, so we set it up using the solid .030 that was in it and argon / CO2 gas. It struggled to burn .030 wire, it needed a heavy wired 20 amp socket close to the breaker to work at all.(probably why it was returned to the dealer). We got by with it for a few years until we finally bought a big 230V Miller 218 ? welder to replace the old stick welder and this little wire welder . The little Century wire welder laid around unused for a couple of years until I decided to remove the gas kit, reversed the welding polarity as solid core VS flux core uses opposite polarity, and set it up with .030 flux core wire for those jobs where the big wire welder cant be used, like welding sheet metal on top of a combine on a windy day, or other light welding where 230 V power was not available. The little thing worked like a champ with flux core wire, flux core is about 50% flux/ 50% steel, so it is about like burning a tiny .015 -..020 wire. With less steel to burn, the thing works great, even on the end of a 50 ft 12ga extension cord. Flux core wire is much more expensive than solid wire, but is a good rig to have around for those special windy or 20 ft above ground jobs that the big welder cant do. Just wish that when we were using it with shielding gas / solid wire, we had discovered that the poor performance was due to us trying to burn larger wire than it was capable of doing.
Edited by Jon Hagen 4/26/2018 20:05
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First Attempt At Wire Welding
