I Bought The CHEAPEST Plasma Cutter On Amazon. Is It Any Good!?

[Applause] all right so I've learned to buy a plasma cutter for a really long time they're super handy there's so many things that I could use one for I hate using cut-off wheels because they're just just always so sketchy and it's hard to get into certain spots and you can't you know I just prefer not to use a cut-off wheel so I got this bandsaw set up and it's great for making really clean cuts and trying to get really precise pieces you know it doesn't end up with any cleanup necessary but there's limits to what it can do like it has to be on the bench you can't cut something out of a car it's only got this much depth to cut so it you can't do everything with it so as well let me do a plasma cutter and I'd heard horror stories of the cheap ones but most of them were from people who had them five six seven years ago and with welders the cheap welders have come such a long way like this AHP ac/dc TIG that I have this is like a $700 tick welder it does ac/dc it has every adjustment you could possibly need on it it comes with this super nice flex hose which normally the $1,800 machines don't even have a hose this nice it has a flex head torch so you can basically flex this depending on what you're welding because sometimes you know you need it at different angles so anyway it comes with like packed with features everything you could want in a machine made seven hundred bucks and the name-brand machines like this are you know eighteen hundred bucks two grand so I thought maybe that same thing applies to plasma cutters so the only way to know for sure was to try one so with how cheap these are it's like such low risk plus amazon you can return it if it is a piece of junk so I bought the cheapest dual voltage plasma cutter our name was on there it's this one was there was a coupon I think it was to 240 or 250 and then a twenty five dollar coupon center being around 220 bucks the cheapest one I saw was $1.99 but it was 220 only so I liked having a dual voltage machine because both my Walters I run on 110 most of the time because I don't really need anymore I can run 147 amps on this TIG running 110 the torch is rated around 150 continuous so I mean I can pretty much do everything I need to do running it off 110 being able to run it off 110 just gives me so much more options you know as to where I can be in the shop and still use it I can run just a normal extension cord because we only have one 220 volt having 110 makes it way easier you avoid more options to where you can use it I can take it to a friend's house if they need something welded I can throw it on there 110 it's the same concept of the plasma cutter this is one of those things I can see myself needing to use it you know like a friend needs something cut out of his car like bringing it over there to help him real quick you know maybe he doesn't have 220 so I really wanted to do a voltage machine so this was the cheapest dual voltage machine on Amazon looks like it comes with a lot of good stuff so yeah we're gonna try it out we're gonna test it on aluminum steel different thicknesses and stuff and see how it cuts so let's get this box cut open and see what we're working with well awesome our razor knife as usual oh our combination so this is regulator so the one thing I did read on their reviews is that these regulators come stripped and the caps blow off but a lot of people got replacements from them so I would assume that is something that has been fixed but we'll find out yeah that handle I'm really surprised at the size of this thing thing it's tiny like much smaller than I anticipated so we've got some consumables there's thread tape that's kind of cool they give you good tape for your airline things around cable give you a wire brush tube I would assume for the regulator then torch so it's got the same style dual voltage plug as both my welders have so I plug that so that to 220 coming straight out of the machine then you've got your 220 plug here and then your 110 so that's pretty cool because I have a I have three of these I have one 312 there so if I ever lose one or whatever same thing okay so that's air so I'm assuming that goes there this whole like plastic thing over the like brass is kind of weird but okay is that gonna be our control that goes there screw that guy in then we need ground clamp pretty standard looking ground clamp it's a what size connector is this this is 25 this is like a bigger ground clamp yes is a 35 so you can see the size difference between the two here so this one is much smaller than like a 35 is that's interesting I mean I guess that would make sense is 50 amp machine cute little guy very small not quite sure what this is for just going on the bottom of the ocean how is this for we do have a user manual see what the user manual says what is this it's kind of a bunch of random stuff in here yeah tape hose clamps all right assuming these are tough on tape come on bud cooperate stuff on tape is not cooperating I'm gonna get my own Tempe I think that's another thing I read that this threads weren't very good on this but it seems okay like that feels like it's cross-threaded looks straight let's try to give her a Titan that's going alright got our fittings in gauge I get one more rotation out of her come on bud okay so there's that there's that we might need a fitting to thread and a Quick Connect fitting to thread into here for the air compressor hose this one will go in here this hose clamps kind of suck I need to go find one of these quick connect so we can just plug the air hose right into this I think I'll shorten this up some too so I can mount it to the machine I think that's what this brackets for yeah okay so well short well shorten this hose up a lot take the good old Subaru to the parts store the seats in this thing are my favorite part I love the seats she still needs some work but she's getting there school is this Fe I know I need to replace my windshield I'm getting that I'm getting there I'm getting that one thing at a time I'm gonna paint the whole get the whole car painted so I'm just gonna have them pull the windshield out paint the car and then put it back in and I'll make it way easier for Adam to clean it its O'Reilly definitely my favorite parts store of all the chains I've worked at Advance and O'Reilly almost work to autozone Lolly's is the best all right we got our fitting so just gotta get this in hook our line up and then we could see how this thing works it's kind of funny I mounted this upside down after I knew that this was the right way okay cool got the right fitting size all right let's look it up see if it works all right well for starters we got a week from this fitting so gonna try to fix that all right we're still leaking out of this guy here I think I'm leaking out of the hose all right to put a better hose on it put a rubber hose on it right so it was just that hose so got no more a week you can see there's pressure I just put this rubber hose on which is actually like way too thick and it worked way better so I'm gonna shorten it all right we're gonna give her a trial run at 40-inch all right let's see how this goes I would cut it I just don't know what I'm doing tries again let's try something straight cuz this is kind of tricky I'm not super experienced with plasma cutters so you know I'm doing a bad job at keeping this straight so we got this just piece of mild steel this is what I used to use to practice my TIG welding so we can cut that but first get the hang of it a little more I'm gonna cut this which is the toe hook off my Miata this will be an interesting one because I can try to cut all the way through here and then up here first we'll go across here though righto in the shoe that worked really well though now I'm getting the hang of it that's it 40 amps so this stuff's pretty thick you can probably see there that's how thick it is I'll measure it curious so that is five mil thick cut there like nothing at 40 amps there's not a ton of cleanup let's see if this stuff knocks off aside from me holding it at an angle it's actually a pretty clean cut like I had it at a slight angle which is my own fault but I mean it's really not bad at all so now let's try to cut through this and this at the same time turn it up to 45 amps for this test I gotta say this is pretty dope one one of these for a long time trying to clean this up one thing that's surprising to me is it doesn't get the work piece super hot I would think that this would end up way hotter like it would if you're welding but it really doesn't get that hot the sparks though you end up with sparks flying all over I got a couple on my shoe burned a little bit but other than that I cranked it up to 50 on that last one I mean it just cuts through it a lot faster at 50 so I think the only time you need to drop the amperage down there'd be like a reason to is if you were trying to cut through something and not through the thing behind it or something like that but I think otherwise it would make sense to just leave it at full amperage so let's try to cut this guy kind of see what we're doing to the table here though [Music] have to clean that up I'm gonna try to get a really straight cut on this one guess I should mark it huh wondering I'm definitely not used to is having to ground to the piece because normally I just ground everything to the table like when I'm welding but for this I got to ground to it because I don't want it sitting up against the table [Music] yeah it's pretty straight I messed up when I came down onto this piece but for the most part that came out pretty straight so that's the quality of the cut I again cut at a little bit of an angle but and that's the quality of a cut and that's definitely quarter-inch thick so I'm pretty impressed with that it flew right through it the only difficult part was seeing where I was going because it's it's dark on top of the piece I had to lift it up a little bit to get some light on it but other than that I mean zipped right through that so the next thing I want to try is some aluminum sometimes like you luminance pretty soft so I normally cut it with like a wood circular saw but it's real messy and it's it's loud and I don't know it's just one of those things so I want to do it I just want to see how it cuts with this just out of curiosity probably won't cut it with that most of the time but be curious to see how it does all right turn the amperage it down say 42 literally like freakin butter and it actually came out pretty clean like that's really not a super dirty like jagged cut I'd be quick hit with the flap wheel and that's that solid let me do that I mean that's a pretty straight cut very easy to clean up with the cut like the flat wheel I'm impressed with how well it cuts through aluminum I don't make doing complex stuff like doing like a round circle for a fan shot or something way easier because I do it with a jigsaw and it's really tricky to the jigsaw a jigsaw it was still one I have just doesn't quite have the power to cut it well and it flops all around so this will be nice for that I mean so far so good this thing's really really impressive for a freakin two hundred and twenty dollar plasma cutter this thing's rip and it it's tiny that's the coolest thing I mean this thing is freaking tiny here's my welding helmet for size comparison there's my AHP for size comparison I mean this thing is incredibly small it's very light it's not heavy at all super portable I don't even need to build like because I built a cart for these two welders cuz they're pretty heavy and be hard to move around but that thing I don't even need a cart and just pick it up and carry it over to whatever you're working on it's so light so I figured out what this is they send you this it's basically like a welding hood that's hilarious I guess I could put this on the camera so you guys could actually see what's going on I'm gonna try that okay so my plan is to try to cope this pipe you can see we've done it with a chop saw I want to just basically see if I can cut it in a way that would that would basically cope it so that'll be kind of a complex cut this stuff's pretty thick too so we'll see what happens [Music] [Music] [Music] all right well I did a pretty terrible job on that and I didn't even mark it like to be that good but I mean they did it so if I had a steadier hand with this I mean I definitely could do this so I'm pretty impressed with that all right so this is kind of a real-world example I could come up with these are some control arms off my 350z that broke so I want to try to cut basically at this weld on both sides so like for example if I wanted to separate this tube out and then weld a new tube on obviously I wouldn't be doing that to this but just kind of a good real-world example of like trying to cut without like cutting through this you know so I don't know that I'm gonna be able to do it but I'm gonna try oh it's like attached to all the way down here - all right it's gonna be tricky we'll try it all right well the memory card decided to be full right when I was cutting this but we got him separated without really damaging the pipe I cut too much here just because I didn't like it was caught and I couldn't figure out where so I just kept like cutting places that looked like I didn't cut enough but I mean for the most part we got it separated without damaging this so if we needed all like reweld this onto something else we could definitely do it so that's that's really cool I tried to cut around this cleanly but I'm just not like my hand wasn't very stable this is pretty thick - I didn't realize how thick that was I thought it was gonna be like this thickness but it's like double sleeve there so so far super impressed with this operator err on that one - how do you do a very good job I couldn't see it that's the only tough part you got to keep this completely flat with the workpiece to get a clean cut and then you usually don't have enough white to see like where your marks are so that's the only tricky part so then I'll start angling it or pulling it back some and then it starts to get a little messy alright before I end this out I want to compare a couple of different cutting methods so if you're on the fence about which thing you want to buy you one buy a plasma cutter do you want to buy a nice kinder do you want to buy a table bandsaw set up like this this is a Milwaukee bandsaw and a swag off-road Porter Bandstand this combo ends up being like around 400 bucks so it's about double the price of the plasma cutter but it's kind of a different use so anyway let's uh it's got a couple things on this and we'll cut a couple things with the grinder and I can show you guys the differences alright so first we're gonna do a piece of aluminum this is really where this setup shines you know it cuts through aluminum really quickly because aluminum is nice and soft you can run the blade at full speed so we'll do a couple cuts with this piece of aluminum okay so so that's the cut with the plasma cutter you can see how its kind of rough it's not incredibly straight which that's partially my own fault but it's mainly just kind of a coarseness of the cutting edge where as you look at the cut with the bandsaw much cleaner you end up with basically a finished edge there's no cleanup required you don't have to bust slag off you don't got to grind it down like it's it's ready to go ready to weld fit whatever you got to do right off the bat so we'll try another material we use this piece of angle because this is pretty thick and this is where the bandsaw starts to not shine as much because it takes a bit to cut through something like this [Music] so there is our cutting edge oh that's not really a good example having a better one all right well these were my first cuts with the plasma cutter so this isn't a great example but you see how much you know slag is left behind how rough the cut is you know it's not a very clean cut whereas you look at this this is the cut with the bandsaw so it's a much much nicer much cleaner cut like I said it I mean it's a ready-to-go edge you don't have to do anything to make that work to weld it to fit it I mean it's perfectly like almost machined cut so that is a huge benefit to the bandsaw the problem is limitations are talked about before you can only fit a certain size of material in it you can't really do a lot of curvature you can you can curve it a little bit but you can't go crazy it's hard to you can't really cut like a circle out or anything like that limited to material that you're gonna fit on a table and cut through so that's kind of where the bandsaw shines I use this a lot for doing like exhaust tubing and stuff like that you know things that I need really good fit up and really clean cuts on so when I'm welding like building stainless exhaust I use this guy a lot for that so they suit serve two very different purposes I mean this is you cut through something really thick and cut through things fast you can cut through things in weird areas like for example this is bit my roommates car and we're gonna be doing an LS in here and we have to cut basically straight back from here and over and cut this whole corner out so obviously you couldn't do that with the bandsaw I did mine with a grinder it was a pain plasma cutter would shine here it would be so much easier to get it into the tight areas and just blast right through this stuff so the other benefit to the bandsaw is it's a very clean operation it's there's not a lot of metal dust going everywhere there's no sparks there's no you know it's a very clean cutting device it's not just stuff going everywhere you don't got to worry about like covering stuff nearby because sparks are gonna fly into it like it's a very clean and controlled process it's kind of like the TIG welding of cutting stuff it's a very clean neat process so let's cut this stuff with a grinder grinder is very handy as far as getting into tight spaces or weird spots or cutting big things out cutting out in the field like you've got a I have I use this one which is a Milwaukee portal one so it uses their n18 batteries this thing works really well anyway let's see if the battery is actually charged yep full battery alright so let's cut this one quick thing I want to point out is the grinder actually only took maybe a few seconds less time to cut through this than the bandsaw did so as you probably saw that one's a very very messy process there's a lot of sparks going everywhere you're getting hit with sparks no matter what you do and I get sketched out by Andres I've had this explode of my face before I've had on break you know I've had all sorts of stuff happen I see people cut themselves with these things I used to use one every day I worked doing commercial shade structures and we cut a lot of stuff with grinders and I still like do not enjoy using them in any way shape or form but I mean they have their purpose they are handy so this is kind of the cut you end up with say see we got some material left over it's not completely straight like there's some high and low spots and I mean I was cutting about as straight as I could and you still end up with some weird areas and you'll normally end up with a little bit of melting and you'll have to clean that up so it's not as clean as the bandsaw not as messy as the plasma cutter so let's do aluminum with the grinder all right so ah it's hot grinder also puts a lot of heat into the workpiece so that um so that is our finished bandsaw side oh it's hot so fortunately there's no sparks with a woman um but you end up with this kind of stuff where it just kind of melts and ends up with this really ugly edge it's it's honestly about on par with the plasma cutter as far as aluminum goes it just it gets hot enough to where it kind of starts to melt it and you end up with slag and there's a lot of cleanup after a grinder cutting through aluminum so anyway that's kind of the differences between the few again they all have their own very specific purpose the bandsaw is a very specific tool that you use for doing stainless exhaust work and I mean you can do just about anything with it but you get really nice clean cuts but you are very limited as to what you can cut grinder you can cut just about anything sketchy noisy you know end up with a super clean cut and it's very messy plasma cutter you cut through just about frickin anything you can get in anywhere it's very very fast and efficient there's no not as many consumables like cut-off wheels you go through a lot of cutoff wheels if you're cutting a lot of stuff this you're not really gonna go through much of anything you'd go through tips but I mean they're super cheap and they last a good bit so again they all have their purposes but I mean for 200 bucks this is about the same price as a nice grinder and half the price of a good bandsaw set up it won't replace a bandsaw I can't imagine you plasma cutting exhaust pieces and getting a perfect fit to take a wall that can't see that I mean I'm sure it's possible but that's not not very realistic but anyway so yeah I mean I'm really happy with this thing for for what it is and what it does for the price like you cannot beat it I mean 220 bucks I think is what it ended up being dual voltage we did find out that if I try to run it at 50 amps on 110 I'd pop the breaker but I mean if you're cutting down in a car you're cutting sheet metal you could run it at 30 amps and I think you can run for a long time on a 110 without popping the breaker and that's really nice because you got a car over here and it's kind of inoperable you can just run any Inchon cord and carry it over there it weighs nothing so I think I wouldn't buy one that wasn't dual voltage unless I was only gonna cut super super thick stuff I had multiple 220 volt outlets to choose from and extension cords and all that stuff already I would definitely get a dual voltage one which is why this was not the cheapest one on the Amazon it was like 20 bucks more but because it's dual voltage is the cheapest dual voltage one also another thing to note is the consumables for this are like 1/10 the price of a name-brand machine as well the machine is about 1/10 the price and the consumables are about 1/10 the price and I mean I don't you know I can't say I've used all the big-name plasma cutters but I mean this thing does the job you're gonna end up with a messy cut no matter how nice to a plasma cutter you get I mean I can't see you getting enough nicer of a cut for it to be worth 10 times the price so that's kind of my opinion on it that's how I feel about it really happy with this a lot of my friends when I said I was gonna buy this we're questioning it they didn't think it would work so I figured this probably a lot of you guys out there who might be in the same boat where you don't want to buy one because you don't think it'll work I know I was for a long time that's why I didn't buy one hell man I've known what I know now I wish I woulda bought one years ago cuz this is gonna be a super handy machine to have so anyway I guess that's gonna be if this video if there's anything you guys can think of that you want me to try with it that you know might be a deal-breaker or not that I didn't think of I just let me know and like this video if you enjoyed it and you found it helpful comment below what plans could have you have and if you liked it what's your favorite cutting tool because cutting tools welding you think you just need a welder and you can weld stuff and fabricate but like the welder isn't really the expensive part it's the tools to cut all the material they get really expensive because you get into very niche things you know having a chop saw having a cold cut saw having a bandsaw having a horizontal bandsaw having a plasma cutter having a grinder having a tubing not sure that's where it gets really expensive and you end up needing a lot of tools so anyway let me know what your favorite cutting tool is and why and yeah that's going to be for this video thanks for watching make sure to subscribe and I'll see you guys next time goodbye

Channel: Taylor Ray

Views: 1,396,169

Rating: 4.7240028 out of 5

Keywords: turbo miata, ls1 miata, rb miata, miata fails, miata crash, turbo miata drift, sr20 miata, jz miata, 350z fail, corvette drift, corvette slammed, jdm c5, 2jz corvette, 2jz mustang, plasma cutter, best plasma cutter, plasma cutter vs grinder, plasma cutter vs bandsaw, diy plasma table, plasma cutter cheap, how to plasma cut, how does a plasma cutter work, plasma, grinder, bandsaw, best cut for steel

Id: klhwjkdRwZc

Length: 29min 25sec (1765 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 17 2019