MigPlazArc asked about the intial cost of ownership; his questions about wire prices made me wonder about operating costs. I looked up wirefeed settings for different thicknesses of base metal on the Everlast welding calculators, and found that flux core wirespeed settings are lower than those of solid MIG wire. Here's my question: are those wirespeed settings lower because .035 flux core wire has less filler metal than .035 solid MIG wire, and does a flux core weld therefore require a greater amount of wire to create the same linear weld length as a MIG weld? That would affect operations costs.

But as Trip said, with the right machine the application would dictate the process used.