4 Reasons Ordinary Workshoppers Love Learning to MIG Welding

Posted on April 10th, 2024

Have you ever felt the urge to create things from metal? Better-than-ever tools mean this is an excellent time to begin, and welding is a big part of metal fabrication. The simplest, most economical and easiest-to-master option is something called MIG welding. Let me show you why these tools are behind a revolution in home-based metalworking.

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How MIG Welding Works

This one particular welding process has done more than any other to boost the ease and accessibility of welding for ordinary people. The letters M-I-G stand for “metal inert gas” and using a MIG welder is something like using a hot-melt glue gun except that you’re joining metal instead of wood or craft materials. You’ll sometimes hear MIG welders called “wire-feed welders” for reasons I’ll make clear in a minute. These days you can buy a very good, simple MIG welder for less than $250. Watch the video below for a full MIG welding introductory tutorial.

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MIG welders are portable tools that use electricity to create an arc that generates enough heat to melt metal. Every MIG welder in the world also automatically pushes thin wire from a spool through the tip of a hand-held welding gun during use. This adds extra metal to the molten weld area, making the finished weld stronger without need for you to think about it. This feature is why MIG welders are often called wire-feed welders and it’s part of the reason they’re so easy to use. All of the items below were made with MIG welders.

What Can You Build With a MIG Welder

There’s a lot more to welding successfully than just buying a MIG welder, of course, but MIG is still the best place for beginners to start in my experience. I’ve been welding in my own home shop for more than 40 years and there are four reasons MIG welders are still my favourite.

Reasons to MIG Welding#1: Satisfaction

I made this motorcycle backrest in the early 1980s when MIG welders were all big an massively expensive. Welders today cost less than 10% of what they used to, and they work better.

The ability to join pieces of metal quickly, easily and permanently is energizing. It’s fun, useful and amazingly empowering. With the ability to weld, you’ll find yourself imagining how to do all kinds of repairs and projects you never thought of before. That’s often the way it is. You buy a tool and the added capabilities trigger all kinds of realizations and possibilities.

Reasons to MIG Welding#2: Economy

This part from a breadmaker broke, but in 5 minutes it was better than new again with my MIG welder

Even with occasional use, being equipped to weld makes it easy to save thousands of dollars in equipment repaired and items created. This has certainly been the case for me. If you’re an active person, perhaps with some older vehicles to take care of, maybe with a garage workshop space or perhaps a rural property or farm, you can easily pay for a high quality MIG welder in less than a year of savings. Even living in a city, with a garage or backyard space to weld in, you’ll find lots of fun use for a MIG welder. You can even set up a small business welding things for friends and neighbours.

Reasons to MIG Welding#3: Creativity

If you’re a mechanically creative person, you’ll find that your welding projects keep you productively engaged, even when you’re not actually welding. Simply planning a project and imagining how all the pieces fit together is deeply satisfying. My best time to design and engineer projects is when I’m lying in bed drifting off to sleep. There are no distractions and it’s easier to envision how things will fit together. I call this “phase one-ing”. I get some of my best ideas for the details of putting together a project during phase one of sleep. You might find this too when you get active with your welder and metalworking projects.

Reasons to MIG Welding#4: Possibilities

If all the welding I’ve done over the years for my home, vehicles and property were to disappear in a moment, a lot of important things in my life would literally fall apart. It’s entirely possible to make a significant improvement in your life with the capability welding offers. Want to learn how to make MIG welding part of your life? Click here or below and join me as I teach a complete online course on MIG welding for home workshoppers

Click here to learn more about using a MIG welding and watch a video about some of the things I’ve used my MIG welder to make or fix over the years.

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