Here's What NO ONE Will Tell You About Harbor Freight's "Best" Welders....

[Applause] welcome to the shop i'm jared and this is wrench every day and today is another installment in our tool series we've gone back in the past where we reviewed what we call a crash kit something portable that you can carry with you in your car to the junkyard to grab what you need for your project we also covered a thousand dollar budget at harbor freight of what you can get as a starting mechanic or kind of high-end home hobbyist as a complete tool set that i promise to use as my well my main tool set here in the shop despite having probably over a hundred thousand dollars worth of tools i have been using that as my primary set and we will have an update video on that shortly now that it's been a couple months and i can give you a real opinion of it but something else that you need as you kind of develop as a home professional mechanic you've got your own shop with a bay where you're servicing some customers is you're going to need a welder and now in the market there are so many different types of welders it's hard to decide what you should buy so i'm going to try to do my best with a special guest coming a little bit later to give you kind of an opinion of what we think is your best money spent for the welder for both at home and in your small shop so if you follow me here we've got guys come on i've got my starting line are you going to come hey i'm hope that's right no one's here to turn the camera sorry about that guys all right here do me a favor close your eyes and just imagine this really cool pan happening right now okay i'm i'm walking right here i'm walking right here i'm walking right here and there we go all right okay keep your eyes closed you shouldn't open them yet don't open them yet you still have your eyes closed right all right go ahead and open them all right in front of me as well basically harbor freight's welding lineup despite starting my first video off reviewing harbor freight tools by throwing one at the wall and saying it's trash and not to buy it they still reached out to me they wanted to ask why i didn't think those pliers are good they're actually working on making them a better tool which is kind of a really cool thing of what they do to improve but i more or less just needed to add a tig welder to my lineup i've got mig welders from your two kind of main brands and well they were kind of cool and said well how about we send you everything so in front of me we've got a welding cabinet consumables we've got their mig max inverter machine and their tig 205 but i'm calling this a showdown and right now in front of me is just the harbor freight lineup oh yeah there's that really cool titanium plasma 45 as well um but yeah it's not a showdown with nothing else to compare it to right one second rolling in not on a fancy welding cart i have my millermatic 211 this is a machine i bought back when i was a manager at speed for sale i built some really cool parts for some really fast cars with this machine this is what's called an inverter machine and it's what most modern welders are built on it's a very close comparison to that mig max 215. but wait there's there's a red contender you've seen this welder around rolling in from the left side on my welding cart because this has been the welder i've been using lately is the lincoln pro mig 180 and what's different about it compared to everything else out here this is a transformer machine everything else in front of us is an inverter machine kind of the latest greatest technology whereas this is the old tried and true trusty transformer machine there's a little bit that we'll go into and talk about the difference between an inverter and transformer what exactly that means because just because these are inverter machines doesn't mean they don't have transformers they just have a different style then we're gonna get into a little bit of welding tech and then we're gonna do some welding and give you some honest opinions of our three mig machines now i know what you guys might be thinking harbor freight sent me all this stuff i'm gonna only be able to say nice things about it one thing i do appreciate about harbor freight and when they send stuff they only ask that we're honest there's no non-disparagement rules i if it's not good and i don't like it i can be honest about it which i really appreciate because i want to give you guys the best advice possible when it comes to buying some equipment that you're going to need because it's not a small investment so uh yeah let's build this out also it's kind of warm so i want to turn my fans on and you can't hear me when the fans are on so uh yeah let's get some welders out [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] all right and we have got everything out of a box and into its stand rolling cart uh the miller unfortunately doesn't have one lincoln well the lincoln's actually on the miller's old cart so let's talk about everything that we've got in the vulcan and titanium line now the configuration they did fit if you look in the time-lapse savings kind of pulling tape measure to figure things out i could have stacked them all facing out this way but there's two problems with that one on a mig machine you need to be able to flip open a door we've got a nice fresh 10-pound spool of o-30 mild steel welding wire everything's already fed through to the end of the gun which i do appreciate on some of these machines you have a cold feed button what that basically does is full speed ahead feeds that wire through without a welding current so that way you're able to change wire feed new wire whatever you need to do in that regard so that's already but the problem is if i turned it sideways and if it lived in the middle or on the end and i tried to open that door it would hit something if we put it down on this end well we've got two gas cylinders that will be living there both the co2 argon and pure argon mix for the tig which well it's in the corner empty over there i got to get it refilled i haven't bothered because i didn't have a tig yet so now that we've got that well i'll need the gas but i decided on this particular layout because of all the machines you can't easily take the connections off of the mig machine they basically live there full time and it lets them kind of drop down here i have to be a little more careful there we go lets them just kind of hang down and live on that handle side there's enough airflow to keep these things cool the plasma torch they connect very easily this is just a couple screw fittings snaps in this is a quick turn air needs to get to the back of that and then again with the tig it's the same thing you put your plugs in push in turn ready to go super quick and easy so that's this is the layout i went with i like it for function sure there's a pretty way to do it but we're going for function again this will carry two gas cylinders up to the real big boys and then on the back we have got our couple more wire hangers and some tig consumable rods really putting all of this together i have two small complaints with the aluminum rod it's not very strong and just dropping it down it busted out the bottom so i need to quickly get a proper case to hold those things where if you look at their steel rods they have them rubber capped on both ends as i'm expecting they've had a fair bit of kind of blowouts there um really that's about it auto regulated on the plasma which is really nice we'll go into more plasma and tig stuff later on again this is our mig welder shootout just talking about the cabinet if you wanted to buy the cabinet they have smaller ones like this i say it's worth saving up and springing the extra if you've got the room obviously you may not have the room you may be stuck with something smaller or just again carrying a machine around i appreciate just all of the extra little room for consumables to throw in uh manuals that you probably aren't always going to read i've got the tig stuff there the accessories for the tig welders so i really i like this cabinet it's it's pretty good it rolls well drawers close well put together really really really simply so that's a perk but what i'm gonna go ahead and do right now is we're gonna go back to a tripod where i can stand behind these three machines and talk a little bit about the terms inverter machine and transformer machine those are your two main big differences when it comes to really anything welder tig mig they've all changed over to where we're starting to see this inverter technology and it's very prevalent so let's talk about that and then we're gonna have a special guest stop by and uh we're gonna use all three of our mig machines and just give you an honest opinion of what we think of them well actually before that i kind of yeah let's get all that cardboard cleaned up all right before we fire up the machines and start welding we're going to talk welder tech just a little bit we're not going to go too insanely deep but we're going to give you the tools that are going to help you decide what's going to work for your situation now when we're talking transformer machines that is the oldest welding technology that's what lincoln came out with when they basically made some of the first welding equipment it works with a transformer to control adjust the voltage stepping up voltage amperage to control the electricity to do what we need it to do to make our weld they are just simple very robust machines there's not a lot to them and they work and they work for a very long time one of the big drawbacks to transformer machine is they make a good amount of heat that it's hard to get rid of because the components are so big and heavy they just absorb that heat but because they are such a simple machine they're really good in bad environments what do i mean by that if you have a ton of moisture all the time lots of lots of dust if you have a dirt floor in your shop if you're dealing with just you know grinding dust everywhere transformers do a really good job of just living in a bad environment and just working all of the time they aren't the most energy efficient for the power in versus out most online you know articles rate them at about 60 efficiency so if you're welding all day long in a dirty environment um you're gonna see a higher power bill than you would with some of this new technology stuff so new technology inverter machines now just because we call it inverter versus transformer does not mean an inverter machine does not have a transformer in it you still need to have one to control ac to dc switches the ambridge changes there's a lot in electrical theory we don't need to go into but you have to have a transformer as part of that process the way the inverter machines get by with having such a small inverter is a kind of a cool trick where they change the frequency of the power coming into them they have a very complex set of switches and doodads and thingamajigs that turn that 60 hertz i believe into up to a million hertz like they they change the pulse to such a huge frequency that allows them to get by and have a much stronger amperage range coming out with you know the same power coming in one thing you also get out of most of these inverter machines is the ability to plug into a 110 outlet or a 220 outlet whereas our lincoln down here it can only run 220 or you can purchase it for 110 so you're not able to do a quick on the fly switch compared to these newer machines part of the reason you're able to do that in these new machines is they are heavily computer controlled there's a lot of circuitry in them now with those computers you get some really cool new technology uh auto set where you tell it the thickness of your welding the wire you're using and if it's shielded or not shielded with a welding gas and the computer kind of monitors and controls the wire speed and amperages for you now not everyone likes that sometimes you just you want to know exactly what's coming out of the gun so a more advanced user is not likely to use that but if you're starting up and learning to weld it can be a useful tool to have the machine looking out for you helping you get the best weld possible because welds are structural it's not something you want to use an 80 machine for to build something you need to rely on being strong questionable choices not stupid choices remember another nice benefit of these inverter machines is they're very efficient they tend to consume less power overall they call the efficiency rating in the 90 range which more or less means that you lose less power to heat like you would in a transformer machine some of the biggest drawbacks to these inverter machines they're not easy to fix generally all of the circuit boards are fully potted what that means is it's a fully sealed board to help protect it against the elements but that also means if a 30 cent part of that circuitry goes bad the entire board will need to get replaced the other thing is with all of those small switches handling that high frequency change they generate a lot of heat but they also dissipate it very quickly by lots of airflow these have generally very powerful fans they move a lot of air especially compared to a transformer machine but that creates one other really big drawback when you're moving a ton of air if that air is dirty from metal grinding dust from dust and dirt on a dirt shop floor it tends to [Music] clog everything up very quickly so you need to be on top of making sure they're cleaned regularly they have to have a lot of airflow with a lot of airflow they work great one other benefit you know if you need a mobile welder if it's not going to sit on a cart you don't have that much space where you're going to pick it up and set it on a shelf sometimes these inverter machines are very light i mean you can just pick them up now when i say very light sub 50 pounds where you approach 100 pounds sometimes more for a bigger transformer machine so if you need something that's not going to live in a cart inverters work really well for you there are also inverter machines that are what are called multi-process where they can do stick welding they do mig welding and they can do tig welding but they can only do steel and stainless steel seeing as how i plan to do aluminum and potentially other exotic metals i need a dedicated tig machine that's also able to run ac current out of it so if you see yourself doing just some steel occasional stick um a multi-process could be good for you this is pure opinion i've not used them enough to state this beyond you know my objective opinion my concern with them is you can't always do everything well if you have a machine trying to do everything you're making some compromises to to get it all in one machine but if you have very limited space you need the capabilities of stick welding steel tig welding and mig welding a multi-process could be pretty good for you now if budget is your big concern all of these kind of are 900 and up i'm rounding up a little bit this is about 850 from home depot northern tool this is right at 8.99 from harbor freight they have the titanium line inverter machines that are a little bit more affordable in the 600 price point my personal opinion you shouldn't spend less than 400 on a good welder there are some offered harbor freight has their budget budget brand the chicago electric brand with uh i'll say value welding but again if you're doing something structural if you're going to be doing it more than once every five months look at least into the titanium line if you have absolutely no budget concerns at all the miller 211 comes in it's come down in price eighteen hundred and fifty dollars when i bought it it was twenty two hundred dollars plus another hundred fifty dollars for that welding cart it is the most expensive thing on the screen it is a very good welder it was my first experience with an inverter welder where i had to learn a couple things they tend to ramp up slowly where the weld for that first split second is cold and then fires up heat so you have to learn to pull back before you push forward just a couple things that are different this will probably be the same i don't know it's a couple years newer in technology there's a chance that it just fires up hot and is ready to go do i believe this miller machine is worth more than a thousand dollars than the vulcan inverter machine no i think with most of these inverter machines you're seeing most of them come from the same factories so if i was buying an inverter machine um again i i would not spend this money um even when it was brand new i wasn't happy with it so if i'm gonna have to make compromises i'd rather have more than a thousand dollars in my pocket and have a bright orange machine so that's enough talking um i've gotten things set up i've explained what i liked and what i don't like but what you want to know is how do they perform so we are going to put them in the hands of a guy who's been welding his entire life um the doctors were amazed to see him come out of the womb with a set of brazen glasses and a stick welder in his hand so um yeah let's get randy welding you may remember him from the johnny reb series where uh yeah he welds that's that's what he does bosco are you ready to weld it appears not but with bosco we get randy hey randy hey so this is randy gronhold with grc fabrication you were a vital part in helping johnny rev uh live yeah um he's currently broken that hasn't nice nice work that'll come out in a later video but um if you listen closely you'll hear the buzz of our lincoln machine going it was the one that had the tank um i brought randy in i can weld but you are weld you've been welding how many years uh all of them well yeah pretty much i joke that you came out of the womb with uh a welding stick in hand it's not far from the truth no probably not so um but what we are doing uh just so he's going to be able to give the best impression and we can kind of film the best um runs on these test squares is he's just kind of doing a quick get used to the machine and you just went off the the specs on the machine yeah we'll just start out with the listed specs on all of our listed settings on all the machines obviously once you learn the machine you want tweak a little bit from there but that'll give us a good baseline for every machine and what we're referring to exactly is inside all of the machines they tell you okay you're using this particular wire that thickness of wire how thick the material is what your base setting should be and i think you said other than being a little bit cold that was pretty much spot on yeah yes good setting it's not a bad run on a machine yeah we'll do that with all of them kind of get a feel for them and yep what machines are in your shop uh i'm a miller guy and i'm an old school miller guy yeah i like all my old transformer machines so but despite your blood being blue you're going to be honest and unbiased yeah yeah i mean it doesn't matter me as long as it works as long as as long as you can put the metal together so what i'm going to do is i'm going to grab a hood so we can try to kind of watch as he welds we're going to get a little bit of uh randy welding action with our lincoln promig 180 then we will set it up to the millermatic and then we will finally end up with the vulcan and once we're all done then we'll get opinions okay i'll i'll try and hold my judgment if we just see randy throw a helmet that means the machine has just made him very mad yeah i'll i won't throw anything maybe maybe at the end yeah just avoid uh well actually any of the cars yeah okay all right we are behind the mask and randy is in his ppe and hopefully this will let you actually see the weld puddle as he's welding a little more all right we are uh you want to do any more welding with the lincoln or you think we're ready to take you back home to millertown oh well let's get me back to my home i guess all right so what we're going to do now is again i've only got one canister so we're going to change that over to our miller get it plugged into the same extension cord again trying to make it as scientific as possible same gas bottle same extension cord all all the same wire thickness we'll see how that works all right so we have the miller hooked up because i can't stabilize that gas canister it's still living on the rolling cart because we don't want to make a rocket do we not my shop sounds like fun to me could be fun something that is different the fan just ran all the time on that one where in your test like that cycles up and down which is kind of nice as far as noise goes that it just only runs when it needs it yeah it doesn't doesn't sound like a legitimate complaint but it is it does get tires from listening to a fan all day long yeah just that hum yeah so that is nice i imagine if you were running production on this though that i mean if you got multiple guys on the shop you can't hear anything anyway but um if you're working on a project by yourself it's it's nice to have a little peace and quiet everyone smiles so same setup as well just a simple uh t weld so we got two uh two welds to go now one thing we did notice is you backed the wire speed down a fair bit from the suggested yeah uh this machine just in our off-camera test has got um considerably more power which means it's burning wire up quicker so we back that wire speed down quite a bit just to get a similar puddle yeah it's a kind of cosmetic thing too just a little bit of everything all right well let's see how i guess old trusty does for you there right and this is an auto set machine but we're not running that feature we're just manually adjusting it to with the auto set you would tell it how thick your wire is and yeah the thickness of your material and let it let the brain do the thing yeah then it tells you how to do your job yeah it's a cool thing when you're learning but you never learn the right way uh it's hard for a guy that's grown up around older machines to move to an auto set it's a cool feature for guys letter that are learning or new to it but it's hard to teach an old dog much better nice little run all right no opinions yet we're going to go ahead and get the mig max powered up i'm going to probably move the gas canister actually onto the vulcan court because my plan is to run that rig around and if we somehow decide one of these two is the better mig well it can go right there so we have got the mig max 215 set up i believe you put a little bit more heat a little best bit less wire speed correct then it's this listed settings yeah yeah uh one thing we also noticed right away too is that behaves like a tig machine in that it has post flow you stop welding and the gas keeps going for a second yeah which is a pretty nice feature to keep keep the frosty edit into the world um it's just a little weird to get used to because i've i have never used a big machine that did that which and i can also see if you're doing thin stuff you get a little bit of cooling effect as well from it so i it's just a new different thing that's kind of cool yeah just a little weird it feels more like a tig weld at the end then yeah than a big world so all right well let's see how that runs and then uh and we'll set up and get opinions so all right so we have got the same run on every machine we're going to let those cool off so we can kind of look at it we'll let the machine cool off turn it off and uh we'll set up for a tripod and do our uh final opinions okay do you have some yeah i do all right so we have welded a foot right about yeah roughly for every machine so about a foot which if we're being a hundred percent honest it would be nice well you'd probably want to run that cape you know four to five feet total to be you want to spend a day on every machine yeah which we really couldn't do so just we're trying to give quick feeling and that's why i brought in someone who's welded a lot he can make a really snap first impression of each machine so we can give you the best possible buying advice so buying advice budget no you know no dollar amount which machine do you pick well i think we should first say none of these machines are bad machines for the hobbyist yeah they've all performed incredibly well so we had an inverter machine or a transformer machine in the mix and it didn't do bad yeah it it did well but again you're buying it which one do you buy um if no money aside i i'd have to go for the miller i'm probably a little biased there i'm surprised wow the guy that has 14 miller machines is going to take the miller but miller's service history is phenomenal they stand behind their machines for a long long long time so yeah for that investment it's it's nice to know you'll be able to get parts for it for then the indefinite future i'm probably being a little unfair on the vulcan machine picking the miller over it initially because it's the new kid on the block we don't know what the service history is because it's new um but it's a fantastic machine it really is i'm pleasantly surprised by it um and the price point is phenomenal so yeah with money in mind i i would definitely take that machine yeah it it has a couple things that shocked us kind of the pre-flow and post flow of the gas and what what that is when we're saying that is before the electrical arc starts it's already flowing the shielding gas where both other machines once the arc starts like it kind of pairs together that's something you find more in like this a tig machine where especially when you're welding uh aluminum like shielding gas is insanely important it's always important but it becomes very important in a tig machine so we could have opened a manual and read to see if there's something to change about that but we didn't because who reads manuals it's just it was kind of a nice feature that we didn't expect that yeah i can't say we saw a result hey it is jared from the not too uh far off future but i wanted to jump in real quick and interrupt uh old jared and randy from the past where i actually was using there we go the vulcan mig on some of that thin sheet metal and i found that when you get the settings just right that post flow and pre-flow worked incredibly well to keep that sheet metal cool and i was actually able to burn through some small thin sheet metal work faster than i normally would have been able to so it turns out if you uh either reading the instructions or just play with it long enough you're going to figure out how it works and uh i'm i'm quite impressed uh with what it's been able to do so far i can't show you what i've been working on just yet but that'll come later so uh let's go back to the two guys sitting behind machines talking about things they well they just didn't know about them i will say having run both of these when i first bought the miller there was to me at least kind of a learning curve getting used to it i'm not going to say that i've been using the the transformer for a while so i'm not going to say i've kind of you know remembered how i had to weld with the miller the vulcan just you know for a pro am or am pro not quite not quite anywhere near randy's level the vulcan felt just really comfortable out of the hand right away so it does have a good feel the gun has a good feel and one thing that is a big deal to me is consumables um all the parts in there look like a twico consumable so they're readily available yeah they're they're actually marked twice style so it's a shared consumable it's not a only harbor freight thing so you can get it from harbor freight you can get it from any welding supply that it's it's gonna be something you can get just about anywhere it's always important to have a good relationship with your local welding shop and being able to service the machines you have yeah one thing i do want to just kind of quickly add in that we hadn't covered the ground clap of the vulcan um or the ground strap we won't say the clamp um that was impressive yeah it's so nice high quality four gauge cable which is just kind of surprised to see a really quality cable on the crank the clamp yeah you know it could be better um but that's that's kind of a wear item on any wire welder the way welding ultimately works is a controlled short and to have a controlled short you need to be able to flow that current back so the ground is a very important part of it so that that was a cool thing that we both were impressed with regardless for 900 that it kind of punches well above its weight class yeah it really does it's an impressive machine so um hopefully it helps you a little bit uh if you're doing sheet metal the lincoln does have a good good place in home or another another transformer otherwise if if you're a diehard miller fan guilty spend a lot more money otherwise you can probably get by just just great with the harbor freight so um we're gonna put you on the spot i'll give you like four seconds to think of something to come up with something something witty yeah something witty so uh appreciate you guys as always hanging out with us here in the shop i'm jared reminding you to always make questionable choices and yeah what he said i guess that's witty and what do you know okay that's all i get all right we'll see you [Music] you

Channel: The Questionable Garage

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Keywords: tavarish, podcast, do, it, yourself, diy, wrench, every, day, everyday, lamborghini, mercedes, ford, focus, st, rs, turbo, 2jz, 1jz, supra, skyline, jdm, usdm, euro, vw, gallardo, car, stories, doug, demuro, bisforbuild, chrisfix, saabkyle, vlog, daily, guys, talk, flip, rebuild, goonzquad, jared, pink, honda rousey, muscle truck, international, johnnie rebb, earl leeker, 300zx, tool review

Id: rwH3yoSHTmQ

Length: 33min 59sec (2039 seconds)

Published: Thu May 05 2022