Learning your machine and it's capabilities is half the fun! A couple quicky tips for you. #1. Don't weld galvanized stuff, very bad for the lungs! #2. If you use tips that are .005 bigger than your wire it will help when the wire heats up and tries to stick in the tip. Little wire welders like this are great for doing body work also.

 

Thanks!

Yeah I've been doing some research and learning for a while before ever getting the welder and was aware of the galvanized metal issue And so far I'm only using the tip that can installed in the welder and the 030 wire that came with it and it seems to be working out great, no issues at all so far! Keeping the nozzle cleaned out I'm sure helps, as a bunch of splatter definitely makes it's way into it, maybe that's a lot of peoples issues with these welders lol. I have some 035 and tips to step to once I run out of the 030, but I've also read that some people have issues with this Harbor Freight welder feeding 035 wire... We'll see when the time comes though!

 

Man, that is coming along great! I wonder how much money you are saving by doing the work yourself???

 

My experience with the one Harbor Freight welder that I've used was that the wire wouldn't feed reliably unless the hose was kept relatively straight. If it had any sharp curves, the wire would bind. The wire feed mechanism just wasn't very robust. If you paid attention to keeping it as straight as possible, though, it would feed ok.

 

Flux core wire typically requires a knurled drive roller which slightly deforms the wire and can make it feed improperly. Of course, those smaller welders have really small liners as well which is why they don't like sharp bends in the lead.

In a good year I'll go through almost 100lbs of Lincore-55 hardface wire rebuilding the wear parts on our tile plow. Here are a few of my work projects of the last few years:

Combination drain tile stringer & trench closer fabrication. Mostly scrap steel.

All together & checking operation. This ended up being too heavy for our 6xxx series tractor so we ended up just using it as a 3pt hitch mounted trench closer.

New 8" boot for our tile plow

New 4" boot for our tile plow. Old boot installed 3.6 million feet of drain tile 36" deep or deeper.

Our tile plow & tractor used for installation.

An in process picture of the plow hitch I redesigned & rebuilt a few years ago and is still holding strong. I had to reclaim the horizontal brackets that house the bushings for the 4" diameter pivot pin and keep all 4 of them in proper alignment while I burned everything together.

Hardfacing on 1.5" thick 9" wide AR500 plow point. The cross-hatching on the top captures dirt & extends the life of the point.

I will lay down 5-6 layers of Lincore-55 on the underside of the point to provide better wear resistance than the already fairly wear resistant AR500 that the point is made out of.

I use a L-tec 250 (made by Esab) at the shop and have a Miller 211 for my garage. I vary from 75/25 argon/co2 to 90/10 at the shop depending on what I'm doing. Even though the hardface wire has its own shielding, I still run 75/25 over it because it makes the weld harder which is the purpose. For everything else I run 90/10 because I hate splatter and since we are rarely welding on clean new steel, the 90/10 helps control the splatter.

 

Quick little 15 minute project from this morning. I had some galvanized 1.5" angle iron laying around and I was getting annoyed with having my two grinders on the welding bench all the time so I made a quick/dirty grinder hanger that just slips over the edge of the table:


Since the L-Tec 250 was already switched over to hardfacing wire, I pulled out our old Miller 140 machine that's running flux core which we used to use in our old livestock facility. It actually works much better than the L-tec with this thin metal.

When welding anything galvanized, you need to remove the galvanizing from the areas you will be welding in or you will have porosity along with a higher risk of getting sick from the fumes. I just use a flap disk to clean up where I'll be welding. You also want to be in a well ventilated area. If you start to get a headache, chills, or otherwise feel sick, get out into some fresh air and find some milk. The calcium in milk will help your body rid itself of the zinc that you inhaled from the fumes.

 

 

haha!!

 

 

I went from doing this stuff growing up to a desk job and am now back at it again. It can be a drag some days, but I'm an owner in the business so I'm invested in the outcome.

Here is an old picture of our equipment that includes our restored JD 4020 power shift, JD 9220, JD 310SG, & JD 310SK. It doesn't show our JD 6115R that was shown in one of the pictures above: