I bought a Lincoln 135amp 110v mig welder a few weeks ago for about $300 on clearance at Home Depot and I just fired it up for the first time this weekend. Man! I had a blast! I've never mig welded before, and I must say that it didnt take long to reproduce some decent looking welds. Before I actually purchased the machine I spent some time reading and trying to learn. I found the Haynes Manual for welding to be extremely helpful in making a newbie to welding kinda understand the basics of each type of welding process. Plus it gave me some good tips that I think paid off while I was just playing around.
I didn't have any particular project in mind, just scowering the scrap yard behind the shop for various bits of metal. I found the factory merge from my pacesetter y pipe (the terrible one) and I just started hacking it up and re welding it back together, or weldling things to it. With flux cored wire I could reproduce welds that looked just like the ones pacesetter made at their factory (except with more splatter). I purchased a small bottle, had it filled with 75/25 argon/CO2, and hooked it up with some .025 mig wire, but wasnt able to make consistantly good welds with it. I'm sure that with time and practice I will prefer welding with gas over flux wire, because you can definitely see that the bead looks cleaner.
Anyway, my point in this post is to share my experience with someone who is thinking about trying to weld for the first time. Mig welding is easy and fun. After about 30 minutes of playing around I've decided that I never need to go to another muffler shop again, thats for sure.
There are some great tutorials on youtube if you just type in Mig welding.
Now, when I get good at this enough I hope to fab up my own turbo kit, and start restoring my old '49 Chevy truck.
Haha, I didn't think to take any pictures. Unless you really want to see a 1ft section of the pacesetter merge with about five new beads, angle iron, rebar, and a few other small steel things hanging all over it then its not hardly worth it. I'm sure someone would call it art though,
Thanks for the link. I just joined it! Looks like there is some good info in there!
Haha, I didn't think to take any pictures. Unless you really want to see a 1ft section of the pacesetter merge with about five new beads, angle iron, rebar, and a few other small steel things hanging all over it then its not hardly worth it. I'm sure someone would call it art though,
Actually, people on WeldingWeb like to see that stuff. It can help them give advice to make you a better welder.
Finally used my new mig welder 
