[cornchip]

its nothing against you personally but i cant wrap my head around why people keep buying these assembled in india esabs. ive read quit a few stories of them broke down. the only machines that seem to break down more often is the small lincolns

 

[cornchip]

employees at my local store know nothing about welding or the equipment. theyre just low paid salesmen. nice guys but they hardly know anything. for someone to take their advice would be a big mistake

 

[cornchip]

smason you surely cant believe all inverters are junk. i would be very suspicious of any repair guy that says such nonsense

 

[cornchip]

My local repair guy doesn't say all inverters are junk. He says they can last indefinitely or blow up at any time. He also says they get ALL the brands, blue, red and yellow in for repair. In other words one brand isn't necessarily better of less prone to failure over others. Of course inverters are not going to go the distance the same way the old simple tanks of the past did.
Personally, I think the advantages of the new inverter technology is worth the risk. Hopefully if there is a problem it happens within the warranty period. If it blows up after that (usually 3 years) the machine should have earned its keep or more than returned the investment. Time to move on.

if you questioned that repair guy a bit more i wonder if he would of revealed he sees a particular brand or model more than others. reading online there seems to be a trend for some being worse than others.

 

[cornchip]

have you looked for any used millers if you dont want new ? people buy a new one then a year later life gets in the way and the machine has to go. might find good deal on lightly used. i wouldnt mind trying the htp220 if i ever got a chance. had their tig machine about 9yr or so and it never cost me a penny in repairs. that gave me alot of confidence in htp stuff

 

[cornchip]

built in predetermined preflow is a bad idea. its better to have it adjustable. and 2sec is far to much for common steel. .1 or .2 is all you need

 

[cornchip]

does thiis machine not have adjustable flow and seperate button for spooling wire and purging gas and setting cfh ? seems alot of money to not have those features

 

[cornchip]

i understand what your trying to say. if you squirt wire out and the machine doesnt detect the arc after say 3sec it shuts gas flow off.

 

[cornchip]

maybe smason is joining the buy once cry once camp now :laugh:

 

[cornchip]

when you hit the $2k mark your within sight of euro machines and the assembled in usa miller. for me atleast ,it would be near impossible to justify the assembled in india stuff if im that far into it

 

[cornchip]

Components come from all over the world and are funneled into the machines. It's really not the welders fault if something doesn't hold up. The bad thing is the reputation takes a long time to cleanse itself after a bad batch. Even Lincoln L56 wire will have a bad bad batch from time to time.

A brand I recently designed was awesome for several years until Covid. The top notch Chinese factory was forced to source a few board components from a previously unused source. Guess what happened. A couple hundred failures later and I bailed out and retired. That brand is now in limbo.

i couldnt believe how many countries supply parts to make up my speedglas g5 01 papr. usa ,poland ,estonia , sweden , canada ,germany (assembly of the adflo battery) , my hunch is japan might be supplying the actual battery parts , china (fabric head and chin cover)