I think you answered your own question - you'll pass on your American-made Miller in your will...
I think you answered your own question - you'll pass on your American-made Miller in your will...
I've only had mine a week and I have no prior TIG experience but I have a few observations.
It seems like a pretty solid unit. Fit and finish are good and it uses industry-standard sized components for the torch.
The foot pedal looks like plastic in the pics but it's actually metal. Has amperage adjustment on it. The binary thumbswitch on the torch itself is just zip-tied on. I plan on removing it altogether.
The accessories provided are not enough to get you started welding. It comes with the pedal, ground clamp, gas hose, torch, assorted cups, collets (1/16, 3/32, 2mm), a 1/16 collet body and a 2mm thoriated tungsten rod. For those following at home, there's no 2mm collet body so you'll be buying tungsten and/or bodies along with your gas bottle.
The scale on the flow gauge is not ideal - 270 degree sweep but because of the range, only ~15 degrees of it are usable. Easy to replace.
Eastwood offers accessories, filler, tungsten, replacement parts all at good prices. Their shipping is telepathic (ordered Friday night, arrived Saturday morning).
I didn't get the plasma cutter but I did get the cart. It has a cutout on the back plate for the gas fitting/line which, on mine, was on the wrong side. I contacted Eastwood about the problem and they telepathically shipped me a second cart, no questions asked. It arrived with the same problem (easy fix, just make a few snips) so now I have two carts. I contacted them again, this time with pictures of the problem.
The settings are easy to understand and there is a material chart on both the welder and in the manual. Some things aren't immediately obvious (torch cup size given in fractional inches when the cups are labelled in whole integers... I found the correlation online).
The unit is air cooled and it runs the fans a bit even after the power is shut off.
It comes with a 220 plug and a 220-to-110 adapter.
Actually welding with it... well, I don't have any experience with other units so all I can say is there's a bit of a learning curve to TIG. Steel is easier, though I managed to punch through my material quite a bit more than with aluminum so far. Oddly enough, I was able to get a cleaner looking weld with aluminum after a bit of practice.
Armitage wrote: Oddly enough, I was able to get a cleaner looking weld with aluminum after a bit of practice.
That's really pretty. I'd be proud of that. (I need to man up and learn TIG)
You'll need to log in to post.
