VIDEO: Small MIG Welder Situation

Okay, in this video I want to explain why you'd want to have a portable MIG welder sometimes

Now in my shop I've got a big MIG welder, it runs on shielding gas, it's got a little cart

it's a great machine except for one thing it's not terribly portable and I'm on a job site right now

and we're doing some preliminary fitting and installation of this railing that you see here

I've made the railing panels up separately, so there's this one, this will be cleaned and painted

when we're done. Here's another panel here and these need to fit to these uprights. There's a

number of two inch black iron pipe uprights in this installation but the key element is that

these tabs get welded to the two inch post in just the right spot. I hope you can see here

this is the panel and the panel has a tab on it and this tab has a hole in it and it bolts to the

tab behind. The tab behind needs to be welded to this post so when we do a final installation

the panels bolt to these tabs that are on the posts and this is the approach that I've used

everywhere. Now of course as I said the critical issue is that these tabs get welded in the right

spot and there's no way that I could reliably do that in the shop. I mean I can measure my head off

and mark carefully and things but there's nothing like actually welding something right in place

so you know what's going on and that's where this little mig welder comes in. It's 120 volt

it just plugs into a regular household outlet. Kicking horse, this is one of the best rated

small non-gas shielding mig welders going and as you can see it's very handy and it's plenty

powerful enough for tack welding these parts. In fact it would be powerful enough to weld these

tabs on permanently but I want to do that in the shop in a better situation and with my gas

shielded mig welder so I can do a nicer looking job. But bottom line is when you need to weld in

unusual places sometimes a little portable mig welder is just the thing. Now of course we're

welding in a finished space here or a semi-finished space so that you know the sparks that come off

from welding are going to cause a problem. There's a finished floor here, there's some

finished floors down below so we need to do everything we can to contain these sparks because

we're only tack welding don't forget it's just a few seconds of welding and then we can take it

all apart take the posts back to the shop and finish everything up. But that's where these

cloths come in. See they're damp right now and we basically surrounded the weld area with these

cloths in order to contain the sparks and it does a pretty good job too. The odd one might escape

but you can see here this is the the tab that's part of the railing and this is the tab that we

need to weld to the post. So that's what's going on here now in this case my bolt holes don't really

align up quite well normally I'd have a bolt through here tying them together I couldn't get

quite enough adjustment with the bolt so I'm going to I want a tight fit here that's the main

thing so I'm going to I'm going to tack that and then I'm just going to drill out the hole later

so the bolt works but you know if you were wondering why a person might want a portable

machine this is a perfect example. You can start your MIG welding career with a little machine if

you're not really sure if you like it or not and get your feet wet but the best arrangement that I

found is to have a nice stationary model and then a portable model lets you do this sort of thing

gives a lot of flexibility and at the end of the day really helps you to succeed