The Air is Full of the Tantalizing Scent of Future Competence

My John Deere garden tractor put me in a position where I needed to weld. I should have summoned my testosterone and used TIG, but I ended up doing something that brought me more short-term joy. I bought a new MIG welder from Harbor Freight. I have already mentioned it here.

I have a Lincoln PowerMIG 180C, which is a small 240V MIG welder. It’s a fine welder, but you can’t run it from a typical wall outlet. You have to use a 240 outlet or a generator. I have no 240 outlets, and ethanol gas killed my generator, so I can’t use it until my new Chinese carb arrives.

Never fix a carburetor when you can buy a new one for a few dollars on Ebay. The quality is exactly the same, and you can be back in action for as little as $11, depending on the machine.

You have to be an idiot to fix an $11 carburetor. Really.

Of course, I have tried.

I got myself a new Harbor Freight Titanium Unlimited 200 welder.

For reasons known only to Harbor Freight itself, the company decided to launch two new lines of welders at about the same time, to complement their really cheap Chicago Electric machines. The new Titanium brand is much better than Chicago Electric (“Chicago” is how Chinese manufacturers spell “Shenzhen”), but it has the same sad 90-day warranty. The new Vulcan brand is a bit better than the Titanium brand, and the warranty is one year.

People are confused by the new welder lines. It seems like Harbor Freight is trying to compete with itself. Anyway, the new welders are about as good as other serious Chinese manufacturers, and the prices are great.

Harbor Freight is now making a number of tools that compete head-on with major manufacturers. In the past, you accepted the fact that your new Harbor Freight tool was not very good and wouldn’t last long, but now you can choose various levels of quality, and some things they sell are very, very good. They’re not as cheap as the lower-level stuff, but they’re considerably cheaper than DeWalt and Bosch.

The Unlimited 200 does MIG, flux core, DC TIG, and DC stick, all for $640 (with the obligatory coupon). It comes with a TIG torch, a MIG gun, and a stick stinger, so you don’t need much stuff to get it running. The one thing it lacks is a TIG pedal, but you can live without that.

I went back and got a cart for it. Welding carts are a problem. They’re generally cheap junk or severely overpriced industrial items. The cart that came with my Lincoln (a prestige brand) was not very good, and I guarantee you, it came from China. I got rid of it and got a better cart from Eastwood. I ended up with two Eastwood carts because they sent me an extra one. That gave me sufficient cart space for the Lincoln, my AlphaTIG, and a plasma cutter, but the Titanium was on the workshop floor. I had to do something.

Harbor Freight has come out with a spectacular Vulcan cart for $90. It beats the pants off my old Lincoln cart. It holds 350 pounds. That means you can put a heavy welder and a 125 cubic foot bottle on it. It comes with a bunch of sturdy hooks for cords. It even has a little plastic toolbox for welding consumables. It doesn’t take up a lot of room, and it’s very easy to move around. I love it. I stuck the Titanium on it, along with the 80 cubic foot C25 bottle from the Lincoln.

The Eastwood carts hold more stuff than the Vulcan cart, but they’re crude and a bit clumsy. You can put two big bottles on an Eastwood cart, which is something you can’t do with the Vulcan.

I used the Titanium to weld my tractor exhaust, and then I decided to get some rods and learn to stick weld with it. My only previous stick experience was not good. I had to fix my bush hog, and the welds I got looked like someone had blown his nose, and instead of mucus, hot steel had come out.

They say that if you want to be any kind of welder, you start with stick, period. MIG is easier, and for many people, it will do everything they want. It will produce very pretty welds. But because MIG is so easy, it discourages people from learning stick and TIG. Because it’s so easy to learn, MIG can turn out to be a roadblock to your progress.

There are some very good things about stick. When you TIG, you have to have metal which is completely bare. It has to shine. You have to grind it or sand it. It’s a real pain. When you MIG, you have to have the metal fairly clean, although not nearly as clean as TIG. When you stick weld, you can–I am not kidding–weld through paint. Stick is the honey badger of welding. You got rust, grease, and three coats of latex house paint? Stick don’t care. Stick welds right through it.

Another good thing about stick is that it requires no gas bottles. Also, the welders are really cheap, because they’re just power sources. You can get a Lincoln (not Chinese) 155-amp stick welder for under $350. My feeling is that if you’re only going to learn one type of welding, it should be stick.

MIG is great, but it won’t weld through rust and paint.

People seem to look down on stick. I think they think it makes crude, ugly welds. That’s not really true. You can make nice welds with stick, and they’re structurally strong, too.

They say that if you want to be a TIG welder, stick will help prepare you. I am a terrible TIG welder. I want to be better at it. TIG can do things no other common welding process can do. You can make beautiful welds on relatively tiny objects. Try using MIG to put a trigger guard on a rifle. No way! People do it with TIG all the time.

If you’re really good, you can weld two soda cans together with TIG, and they will look great. Welders do this to show prospective employers how good they are.

Yesterday I set the Titanium up for stick, and I got out two kinds of 3/32″ rods: Vulcan (Harbor Freight) 6011 and Lincoln 7018AC. I had heard that 6011 was good for thin metal, so I figured it would be good to learn how to use it. It’s harder to weld thin metal than thick.

Man, what a mess I made. I fired up the welder with the 6011, and I couldn’t strike an arc to save my life. Youtube professors say to act like you’re striking a match, but when I did that, the rod almost always welded itself to the steel. When I finally got it going, it stopped and started no matter what I did. I got wide, hideous, low welds that looked about like the mess I made on the bush hog. The metal got red hot, even half an inch from the welds.

I never did get the 6011 to work. I tried the 7018 rods, and while they were also hard to start, they made fairly normal-looking welds. That was encouraging. There was some hope I could stick weld, if only with the limitation that I could only use 7018 rods.

I went back to 6011. More sticking. I even managed to strike an arc on my welding lamp at one point, because I yanked the rod off the metal and waved it over the table without thinking.

I got very frustrated. I had to fiddle with everything over and over, because the rods kept getting stuck. Sometimes I flipped my mask up. Eventually, I did the unthinkable. In my annoyance, I forgot to flip the mask down. I struck an arc and realized I was only protected by reading classes from Dollar Tree.

This is called “flashing yourself.” Your eyes get a big dose of UV rays, and then, if the exposure is severe enough, you spend a day or two feeling like there is sand in your eyes. It’s very unpleasant. Tears flow all the time. One of the worst things about it is that you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen until several hours after you weld.

I turned everything off, went inside, located some painkillers, and waited. Fortunately, nothing happened.

Of course, I used my supernatural tools. I prayed for healing. I commanded injury to leave me. I commanded my eyes to be healed.

I felt things moving around in me. It was very obvious. Some kind of serious battle was going on.

You can tell when demons are upset, believe me. I wish I could say there are no demons associated with me, but they still show up. With God’s help, I fought them for quite a while.

It’s too bad most Christians–the same people who worship a man who believed in demons–don’t believe in demons. They’re very real, and they are messing up your life right now. You don’t have to be an epileptic or a schizophrenic to have demons. Unfortunately, they’re for everyone.

Today I went out and tried to stick weld again, and things went a lot better. I got some advice, and I was told to increase the amperage. The 7018 rods worked so well, I can now say I can weld with them. The beads are almost as nice as MIG beads. I still can’t deal with 6011. The first rod worked fine, and after that, more flat, hot welds and stuck rods.

I’m wondering if Harbor Freight sold me a box of funny rods. One rod should be just like the next.

I found a good cheap metal supplier here, and being from Ocala, the people there could not be nicer. I should invent a project and go get some metal from them. I need to start doing fillet and lap welds with 7018.

I plan to get some new gas bottles. My argon bottle is 125 cubic feet, which is as big a bottle as I am willing to try to move. I have an 80-foot bottle of C25 on the Titanium. I want to get a 125 for the Lincoln, plus a 20-foot bottle of argon for the TIG. If I have a 20-foot bottle, I won’t be caught flatfooted when the big bottle runs out. I’ll just connect the small bottle and take the big one to be swapped. When the little one conks out, I’ll have it swapped. I’ll have to make two drives instead of one, but that’s not a big deal, and it beats shutting a project down for a day.

I might get a 20-foot C25 bottle for the Titanium. One of the great things about this welder is its weight (under 25 pounds). I can put my generator, the Titanium, and a bottle in my truck if I have to. Maybe that’s a stupid idea, though, because I can always use rods instead of MIG.

I may also keep stainless wire on the Titanium and carbon steel on the Lincoln. That would be convenient. Switching wire spools is not fun at all.

I need to get my 240 outlets installed. Guess I should call about that tomorrow.

It’s nice to be welding again. Next, I need to get the belt grinder working. After that, it’s time to get my machine tools moved up here.

Sooner or later, I’ll be up and running at full speed again. That will feel great.