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Okay, in this video I want to explain why you'd want to have a portable MIG welder sometimes
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Now in my shop I've got a big MIG welder, it runs on shielding gas, it's got a little cart
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it's a great machine except for one thing it's not terribly portable and I'm on a job site right now
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and we're doing some preliminary fitting and installation of this railing that you see here
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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
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to these uprights. There's a number of two inch black iron pipe uprights in this installation but
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the key element is that these tabs get welded to the two inch post in just the right spot
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I hope you can see here this this is the panel and the panel has a tab on it and this tab has
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a hole in it and it bolts to the tab behind. The tab behind needs to be welded to this post
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So when we do a final installation the panels bolt to these tabs that are on the posts and
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this is the approach that I've used everywhere. Now of course as I said the critical issue
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is that these tabs get welded in the right spot and there's no way that I could reliably do that
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in the shop. I mean I can measure my head off and mark carefully and things but there's nothing
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like actually welding something right in place so you know what's going on and that's where
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this little MIG welder comes in. It's 120 volt it just plugs into a regular household outlet
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Kicking Horse this is one of the best rated small non-gas shielding MIG welders going and as you can
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see it's very handy and it's plenty powerful enough for tack welding these parts. In fact it would be
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powerful enough to weld these tabs on permanently but I want to do that in the shop in a better
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situation and with my gas shielded MIG welder so I can do a nicer looking job. But bottom line is
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when you need to weld in unusual places sometimes a little portable MIG welder is just the thing
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Now of course we're welding in a finished space here or a semi-finished space so that you know
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the sparks that come off from welding are going to cause a problem. There's a finished floor here
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there's some finished floors down below so we need to do everything we can to contain these sparks
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because we're only tack welding don't forget it's just a few seconds of welding and then
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we can take it all apart take the posts back to the shop and finish everything up
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But that's where these cloths come in see they're damp right now and we basically surrounded
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the weld area with these cloths in order to contain the sparks and it does a pretty good job
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too. The odd one might escape but you can see here this is the the tab that's part of the railing
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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
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Normally I'd have a bolt through here tying them together I couldn't get quite enough adjustment
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with the bolt so I'm going to I want a tight fit here that's the main thing
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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
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a portable machine this is a perfect example. You can start your MIG welding career with a
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little machine if you're not really sure if you like it or not and get your feet wet
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But the best arrangement that I found is to have a nice stationary model and then a portable model
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lets you do this sort of thing gives a lot of flexibility and at the end of the day really
