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[MasterKwan]

It was a 350.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/283742777348

I just thought it would be fun to play with. You can add a gas kit to the 350 so you don't need to use a torch with gas valve. Yeah, reading your posts, the impression I got was that any profits would be thin. I'm just surprised...

[MasterKwan]

I'm on the welding reddit. Female welders come in and talk about the harassment they face. The trades seem to be full of drugged out losers and dead-beats so I guess it's not surprising. Females face sexual harassment. Noobs face hazing thinly veiled as jokes. Pay seems to be poor. It doesn't...

[MasterKwan]

I bid on a broken XMT on Ebay. It's already jumped to $200 which is well over my "willing to lose to play with a broken welder" threshold. Makes me wonder if there is some cottage industry in XMT refurbishing. Even working they're relatively cheap used....

[MasterKwan]

I mean sure you could. To me that sorta defeats the purpose of having ramps. Having to carry ramps and wood around. I was thinking about maybe making ramps with 2 pieces each. A small extender you could attach. It's still extra though....

[MasterKwan]

My biggest issue with commercial ramps is they aren't wide enough for any car with decently meaty tires and the approach angle is such that my bumper would hit the ramp before the tire does. They work for SUV's just fine but not for sporty cars. I'd probably build a light duty prototype out of wood...

[MasterKwan]

hthttps://www.red-d-arc.com/pdf/EX360%20Service%20Manual.pdf

Makes me want to get one...

[MasterKwan]

I have cheaters in my helmet. They clip in and magnify the weld joint.

I was wondering if a new mig is actually better than the old 175. Looking at the schematics for both machines, they're almost the same machine. They're both 30% duty cycles at 150 amps. Looks like the Hobart has...

[MasterKwan]

You probably have to look it up by serial number but the manual I looked a shows HF start. It's a transformer based machine with triacs instead of IGBT's....

[MasterKwan]

What I'm not clear on is whether they're unreliable but people aren't talking about it or are the broken ones we see here the expected exceptions and most are reliable. I just don't have a handle on it.

I offered a guy $50 for a broken Mig welder he was asking $400 for. $400 was a reasonable...

[MasterKwan]

Sure or you could be like the Dynasty 280 guy, 35 hours of welding, then it's dead. He paid $6000 or more for that machine. These days I think of welders like cell phones. Get one that's good enough, expect to replace it in 5 years with another cheap one. My math would be different if my job depended...

[MasterKwan]

The difference is that I can get both manuals and parts at a reasonable price for a truck. For one of these welders, as the recent Dynasty 280 discussion helped reveal, when an inverter welder goes bad it might not be worth fixing, parts are exorbitantly expensive and there's no readily available documentation...

[MasterKwan]

You can buy a brand new AHP-201XD for $720 with 3 year warranty. I'd get the Everlast for about that same price. If I welded for a living, I'd get miller. As a hobbyist, I see no reason to go crazy on a machine. I used to own a Dynasty 200 and the AHP is just as good for the kind of welding I do. I'd...

[MasterKwan]

The only reason, I'd swap the 210 for an Everlast would be if I needed a lighter package. The 210 is > 130 lbs though so, maybe they needed a light machine to lug around. Still, you can get an Everlast with water cooler pretty cheap compared to this machine....

[MasterKwan]

I was eyeballing some Everlast Tig welders. You can pick up a nice one with cooler that costs less than that $1900 board and comes with another 3 year warranty. Like you, I'm a hobby welder, A failed $800 welder every couple years is more palatable than a failed $6000 welder....

[MasterKwan]

Looks like highway robbery to me...

[MasterKwan]

Probably a bad display. The fan is wired to come on as soon as the unit is powered up according to the schematic I'm looking at.

https://www.red-d-arc.com/pdf/Miller...s%20Manual.pdf

[MasterKwan]

I'm self employed too. My biggest expense is health insurance. It's about $20K a year and it's not even particularly good insurance....

[MasterKwan]

This goes back to something ChuckE said, It's a business, not a charity. If you're normally busy, some jobs aren't worth enough money to bother doing. ChuckE recommended not even bothering with nickle and dime jobs. I imagine if you're real new and need to build up some reputation, it might be worth...