OK, neighbors here I go...

[Kempy]

Yofish, that is a nice trailer you built and nice welding too is that the one you used the converted 30A to the Everlast welder on?

[fdcmiami]

Disney might object; how about something more representative of yourself...a blowfish perhaps? lol. then again mickey mouse is pretty good too...or maybe Pinocchio.

[Yofish]

Hey! My posts are being deleted. I guess that is what being 'on probation indefinitely' means.

[Yofish]

I finished this trailer project for a friend that has a water taxi service:



The only interseting part of this project is that is the first time I've used torsion axles, provided by Pacific trailer, Chino, CA. The other I used the little bug sprayer unit some to get a better feel for it. Here is a series of welds that are completely acceptable to me:



I didn't weld the whole of it with the Everlast, but given the weld sequence, I may have been able to. A good test is coming up soon. I have an interesting remodel on a power skiff next week which will be the first real test of the units abilities. I'll report.

So for the Miami mouse ankle bite guy, I've developed a new Everlast logo:



And here is the BEST MOST EXPENSIVE first class ticket that I can find:



When you arrive and I do the 'weld that wasn't done by MIG' ten times for you, then you can meet the owners of the boats which I showed. At the first stop, I'll introduce you by your name. After you are completely humiliated, afterwards, I'll intro you as a 'dildo rod burner from Florida' that is learning an expensive lesson in humility. Put up sport, or STFU.

[fdcmiami]

you may be a boat builder in the sense that an architect can say he built a building. maybe, but I doubt it.

it could be you want to plug your software.

it could be you are just an underfunded electronics hobbyist having fun in your free time, (there are plenty here) and you are for some reason trying to reinvent the wheel.

any boat builder that has come far enough along to be contracting with clients as substantial as an electrical utility. purchasing the cutting software, wire? (one pound spools?)

11,000 pounds of aluminum. and then on the other hand trying to adapt an underpowered everlast mig gun... to what? take over from miller and Lincoln? lol

(no offense to everlast, I am an owner).

12 inches of weld on a chine, (a heaven sent weld for a welder as far as boat construction) and you have to dip the tip of your (what gun was that again) into a bucket of water every 12 inches to cool it off. lol 3/16ths to 1/4 thk material. yes indeed.

give me break. or are you laying on a creeper, by yourself, and welding that (hard chine)in the overhead position.

finally, although I cannot see it clearly enough, I doubt that the weld in pic one was done with a wire feeder.

oh, i'm curious, are you the bellamy from linkedin that is the electronics specialist in anchorage, ak? grad of u of AK. just a guess.

[TheGary]

fdcmiami what is your problem? This man does not deserve your sarcasm and I have found that most who are sarcastic on the internet have little to be proud of in real life. It sounds to me like Yofish makes his living on this kind of work. Man lets be civil and learn from each other instead of insulting each other. I for one am very interested and pleased with what he has acomplished with this " little mig machine" . He did what he was told could not work. I wish I had a dollar for everything I was told would not work but I went ahead and did it anyway. I am very interested in what he set up for portability because I for one do 80% of my work mobile.

[Yofish]

fdcmiami what is your problem? This man does not deserve your sarcasm and I have found that most who are sarcastic on the internet have little to be proud of in real life. It sounds to me like Yofish makes his living on this kind of work. Man lets be civil and learn from each other instead of insulting each other. I for one am very interested and pleased with what he has acomplished with this " little mig machine" . He did what he was told could not work. I wish I had a dollar for everything I was told would not work but I went ahead and did it anyway. I am very interested in what he set up for portability because I for one do 80% of my work mobile.

TheGary, the sport from Miami is hilarious! Either he's a tippler or his wife kicked him off NASCAR for the Discount Jewelry Shopping Channel, maybe both. A practised troll; just respond to the last post without reading the thread, cast aspersions and act like you know what you're talking about. Pick nits, suggest the OPer is lying and hopefully engage target slob in a peeing match so he can pump up the limp ego. Wash, rinse, repeat. A sad lot they be!

As I've said, after I squared up the possibilities Everlast offered, I choose to go after a machine that is super portable and not a shop workhorse. If what Mark@Everlast says is true, and this machine runs well off a 5.5K gen, then it will be humanly possible to get it in a small plane like a Cessna 180. For years I did a lot of work in the Aleutians, which, is about the ends of the earth. In one location, we had a Miller BlueStar CC machine that I hooked up to a 30A to do boat repairs. CC and aluminum is ugly but it works if you are patient and have lots of spare contact tips. That unit got there via Grumman Goose. So just imagine a gen that weighs 200# and this set-up that weighs nothing and it can actually weld! Alaska is full of remote weather stations that are entirely made of aluminum. They look like funny pyramids. Anyway, they occasionally need repair........

In this unit I'm going to toss the internal wire drive assembly and turn the space into a lunch box. Who needs it if you have a gun? Toss the too stiff vinyl power cord and the whimpy clamp and replace it with a short 10ga. SJOW cord about 24" or so long and a metallic cord clamp. I have a 50' 8ga. extension cord. Get a 40 cu ft tank that weighs 27# (empty). Now we have a unit that will work in my local harbor that has locations providing 220VAC. Can pretty much get the whole taco down the ramp on a two wheeled dolly. So we have 50' of stretch to the box and 30' from the box. 80' gets me (usually) anywhere I want to go. One of the biggest attractions of this unit is that it will run off 208 (so said Alex, the salesman). ALL of the larger boats I deal with where 80' is not enough (talking Bering Sea crab boats) have serious power generation capabilities but it's all 208. I turn down a lot of work because frankly, I don't want to break down my main machine to go spend two hours fixing some gill-netters broken net reel. What! You didn't strip the net off before I got here?!! It's just not worth it. Now it is.This thing will sit in the corner until needed. It's really rather amazing that you're (and another who has PM'd me for a schematic) about the only poster that actually 'gets' what I'm after. That it couldn't be done, I immediately rejected because nothing that was said made any sense whatsoever. We're not talking brain surgery here.

[Yofish]

So, after more messing around I came up with the minimums (for me) of what makes a reasonable weld with the little machine using the fewest resources. The first pic shows the weld with the machine set at 19.5 V and 185 mouse bites per minute on the wire and drawing between 146-151A, .047" 5356 wire on .190" material. The appearance isn't buttery, being short arc and therefore there are BB's and spatter but the puddle was nice and fluid, good cleaning, the penetration looked decent and the legs tied into the base material:



Welded on one side only, I beat it over as far as I could on the anvil. The upper leg is just beginning to pull away from the base but under magnification it was tied in, it's not a cold lap. This is a pretty common failure you see in boats; the parent material alongside the weld (heat affected zone) lets go after uncontrolled flexures before the weld ever will. I'm pretty sure this was 5052, the scrap bin is not segregated but 5086 would have cracked more, I think. Anyway, the upsot is that I can live with the results and gain another 8-10% on the duty cycle, which is important. Notice the weld behind which was done at one and 1/2 more volt and 210 on the wire. Much nicer appearance but it drew up to 160+A.

[Rambozo]

Looks very interesting. Could you measure the actual wire speed, just for a reference? Especially at the 210 setting, that looks really nice for times when you can spare the duty cycle, or on a wee bit larger machine.

[everlastsupport]

Like I mentioned before, we use a IMIG200 with aluminum all the time, and mobile with a 5500 watt generator.

No one said it will not do aluminum, just no spray.

We use straight argon and .030 4043 for our goto welding to fix rails, gates, john boats, etc. We do mobile welding all time with it and a 5500 watt generator (porter cable/vanguard).

Note, you can lay the argon tank on the side for aluminum runs. But on steel, it is either flux core (my son hates but tank required) or argon/co2 mix. The co2 tank need to be vertical to weld otherwise the liquid co2 will freeze up the regulator and cause damage.

On the .047 5356 at 210 speed and 20volts, might have to pick up a a small spool next trip. Thanks for posting your settings.

[Yofish]

Looks very interesting. Could you measure the actual wire speed, just for a reference? Especially at the 210 setting, that looks really nice for times when you can spare the duty cycle, or on a wee bit larger machine.

Rambozo, I don't quite get your meaning of "measure actual wire speed"? As in pull the trigger, count to ten and measure the wire length? Yes, one can get some very nice appearing welds with this machine and it will certainly 'spray' but I have no attraction to spray per se because it is useless for what I'm trying to accomplish here. IMHO, this attraction to the Holy Grail of 'Spray Mode' is idiotic. One could certainly 'spray' the weld where a .125" deck intersects a .125" side plate on skiff but you would only do that once. The heat distortion would kill you. You wouldn't go 5' before you realized that you made a very, very big mistake. Not to mention the near impossibility of preventing some burn-through. Having said that, I have seen it done but only with a very fast no-weave weld that has dodgy penetration. At 65, arthritic and wearing trifocals, I ain't the machine I once was.

And again, I have a larger machine, that's not the point.

[Yofish]

Setting up a new computer, I checked out how my bookmarks imported and for some reason I clicked on this page. I was shocked to see EXACTLY 5k hits. I wish I was in Vegas. I think sometime back I said adios to the nonsense of trying to deal with Mark and others that I thought were missing the point. Anyway, in the spirit of this thread getting all the interest here is a pic of the last job I did with the little Miami Rat Welder, which, performed flawlessly. This is an old Raider Marine bow well seine jitney that I modified to be used in a mariculture business as a mussel declumping and sorting barge. Absolutely funky aluminum made it a challenge. The main hold and outboard well got decked over and lots of penetrations plugged. I can't find a pic of the finished product right now but I will and show it. None of this needed to be put together in the magical-only-way-to-weld-aluminum-spray-mode. I only crowded the little guy once. I could go on about how 'spraying' old funky AL is not the best method but I'll stop. The important thing for me is that this machine continues to do what I intended: it has been left at that site since the Middle of August, I carry on in the shop because I don't need it. When I return to retrieve it I know the client will want some mods.