How good are no-gas mig welders these days?

I had one about 5 years ago and frankly it was crap, have they improved?

I need a new welder and I thought I might save the price of the gas, what do you reckon?

Cheers

Chris

there still not very good.but i use one to save buying gas. i got 2 rolls for £8 off the bay. you just have to take your time with it to get a good weld.
adam

how much welding do you have to do? i got a clarke 151te in march last year, and i'm actually still on the original disposable gas don't know how i've done it, mind you i've only really used 1.5kg of wire. don't do too much welding tbh.

when you look at prices though, it works out to something silly like £43 per kg of gasless wire, or £10 for 5kg of normal wire, and another £10 for a disposable bottle of co2. many would say it works out too expensive for the disp bottles, and you should go rental.. but it works for me!

i think the gasless ones are false economy tbh

im the same as Blake got my 151te in april and only just replace the wire that came with it i got 5kg of wire for about £10 (machine mart vat free day) and a spare bottle of gas for £8 im still on the bottle that came with it and have just about finished tacking up my haynes roadster chassis just have the trans tunnel to do. that also includes lots of practice welds

Davie

^ lol, i replaced the wire 2 weeks ago! guess we work about the same speed

It's just for a bit of tacking and some household stuff, I have professional welders at my disposal 24/7, as you can imagine......

I'll stick with the gas, I didn't know that the gasless wire was a lot more expensive.

Thanks chaps

Chris

sorry, made a mistake, its £47 for 4.5kg of gasless wire
or £10 for 5kg gas wire

The gasless welders themselves are usually junk as the are made on the cheap. However gasless wire in a good welder that can reverse the polarity to suit is good, especially if you like to work outseide where gas would normally be blown away from the weld

I used gasless for around 15 years and apart from the cost of the wire had no issues at all with it. The welds need cleaning more and you can get inclusions from slag but if brush down the weld that won't happen. It's also a lot hotter on panels so doing something like a door skin requires a bit more skill to prevent distortion but it can be done. If your going to be doing the odd job or working outside in the wind use gasless, for bigger jobs or welding something like a chassis I’d use gas.

Not as good as proper MIG for most of the stuff we do Gasless is OK in fact better than proper MIG if you are welding outside BUT they can never produce as clean a weld as argon-co2 mix, the weld must be wire brushed after every run.

One good point is although gasless produces a more spatter, the spatter dosen't adhere as strongly as the spatter when using straight pub co2.

If buying a new hobby welder go for a Clarke

One little gotcha that I found with gasless wire is the diameter - 0.9mm I think. I was blaming the welder and/or wire for jamming all the time, then read the wire reel label and realised that my 0.8mm tip was too small. Drilled out a new tip to 0.9mm and it didn't jam any more.

I used gasless for a while as I didn't want to pay bottle rental while I only used the welder for odd jobs now and then. Reasonably happy with the results, although I found the smoke and fumes a bit of a pain. Now I've got a pub CO2 bottle that I don't pay rental on, the gasless wire has been put away.

The no gas welders are harder to use but a small bottle of gas at about a tenner will only last about a metre or so in a conventional mig, welding continiously, if your lucky a few metres.
Does it still sound so expensive to buy gasless wire? You can buy it a lot cheaper in the ebay shops than machine mart or screw fix.