I can divide my life into two distinct segments: the time before I owned a welder, and every day since. When I bought my first truck, a 20-year-old Tacoma with a rusty frame, my welder made it roadworthy. When I started my blacksmith business out of my grandparents’ garage, I used my welder to build a forge out of scrap metal. And when a neighbor needs a railing fixed, it’s my welder he wants me to use to fix it—usually for free.
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My great-grandfather was the first welder in my family. He started out running a welding shop, and later, during World War II, a school named Wicks Welding in Queens, New York. In his day welding required a complicated setup of machines and gas tanks that looked like they belonged on the set of a bad sci-fi movie. While the usefulness of welders hasn’t changed a lot since then, the technology has. Now welders are accessible to anyone, regardless of skill, and you don’t have to break your back or the bank to use one.
We tested eight of the best new entry-level welders. They can be plugged into a normal electrical outlet and run without any gas tanks using a process called flux-cored arc welding (see opposite). And when you’re ready to buy some tanks, they can also be run as MIG welders. These four were our favorites
A MIG (metal inert gas) welder is a kind of arc welder, and all arc welders use the same basic principle: an electrical current is passed between two electrodes, causing a short circuit across the gap between them. This short circuit, or arc, can be anywhere from 5,000° F to 40,000° F, so it melts metal very effectively.
In a MIG welder, one of these electrodes is the metal you are welding, and the other is a spool of metal wire. The wire is fed automatically by pressing the trigger on a handheld gun. The wire becomes a “puddle” of molten metal, thus creating the weld. To prevent the person doing the welding from receiving a powerful electric shock, an earth clip must be connected to a ground point.
Unfortunately, there's a basic problem with this kind of welding. Nitrogen, oxygen, and other things in the air we breathe contaminate the process. This weakens the weld. The solution is to create a “shield” around the weld area while it's being formed. There are two ways this is achieved.
- The first method uses gas – usually a mix of CO2 and argon. This is supplied from a tank and piped to the tip of the welding gun. It exits right by the welding wire and forms a protective bubble, or “shield.”
- The second method uses a metal wire with flux in the center. Strictly speaking, this is called flux-cored arc welding (FCAW), but it's generally seen as one of the two methods of MIG welding.
Somewhat confusingly, there are two types of flux wire: gas-shielded flux core wire (which still needs a gas supply as above) and self-shielded flux core wire (in which the flux burns, releasing its own protective gas). The latter is by far the more popular type; it's commonly called “gasless” in order to differentiate it from “gas.”
Many MIG welders only work with flux core wire, but the best MIG welders can accommodate both methods. So an obvious question is, which is better? Here’s a look at the pros and cons of each.