“Welding will put you in good stead no matter what your chosen vocation” My patients do not appreciate my new skookum laceration repairs... but the local burn clinic sure seems happy with me!
As a welder I will say this learn how to cut metal first. I have seen people fired just because they couldn't cut their own metal. Also a saying for all you welders or soon to be one, "a decent welder knows how to prevent a fire, a good welder knows how to stop a fire, but a great welder knows how long you can weld while on fire."
When I was young enough that riding a panhead was cheaper because you had to kick'em, I would get a dispatch, show up at a boiler or a tank farm and the super would point me at the boneyard. I had the morning to dig out a hunk of 3/4 or 1" plate, whittle off a couple of slabs and lay bevels on them with a gas axe, tack the test to the side of the boiler and fill'er up. No grinder, no wire wheel, no flap. Gas axe, hammer, welder. Better pass x-ray when the techs shot at night or no meat in the sandwich that week.
@Jon Doe why wouldn't you want your child to be bilingual by 5 years old it's a great thing how many languages will she be fluent in by, 10 years Aids learning and intelligence
The interaction between you and your daughter in your videos is priceless! It makes me smile every time she speaks up in your shop. You are a "COOL" Papa! AND a great mentor and teacher!
We've been testing a Vulcan Pro Tig 200 at work for the past 6 months. Running full on production in an industrial environment 16 hours a day 5 - 7 days a week right next to the Millers and Lincolns that cost 4x as much, and it's doing it running on half the voltage as the Vulcan only runs on 240V whereas the others are 480V machines.. 6 months in and the Vulcan is still hanging right with the blues and the reds and hasn't shown any signs of failure. For the price we're thoroughly impressed with it.
Once upon a time, I was a fresh-out-of-college mechanical engineer in a glorified job shop. The old union welders took a shine to me and taught me how to weld, first using stick and then mig. An invaluable education that I still use 25 years later.
I first learnt to gas weld in 8th grade shop. Then stick while in HS. Then 20 years later MIG and teaching myself TIG now. I agree, it is best to start with gas welding or stick. MIG is an easy extension to Stick. TIG is an easy extension to gas.
I am pretty sure at this point, there is someone over at Harbor Freight corporate that is paid to watch AvE videos and then pass that on to the enginerds.
That's the product of good parenting. I don't believe in shitty children. I don't believe in good children. They're blank slates, by and large, and they pick up on your habits and expectations for them.
Whattaya gonna do? I'd prefer to shit all over it, but I callz em like I seez 'em. We'll see if it holds up to "casual home use". *gleeful hand-wringing intensifies*
I’m glad you mentioned conductive dust intrusion. I never grind inside my shop, because of all of the shop fires I’ve heard about. Everything inside your shop that runs on pixies can be a fire waiting to happen with grinding dust inside. Grind outside, or in a separate booth inside: it’ll save your shop/house.
Great episode but what really got me in this one was how good of a father you are. I love that you’re teaching her to be bilingual. She’s going to be brilliant. Congratulations sir, it’s great to see a man of integrity.
AvE, i'm beyond stoked to support your channel. That moment with chickadee was genuine as can be. It's awesome to see youngens in the shop getting excited to learn. I really enjoyed this one. Thank you.
So I am deaf as Beethoven, and I listen to your stuff with the captions on. When you were speaking french to your daughter the captions literally read "sieze your piss my toenail do all dummies ooty tapas went rrz so to play.
When I was a boy my uncle was a blacksmith and I learned Forge welding metal first. Then he taught me oxy-acetylene welding which set the foundation for all the other welding processes that I know.
Jees-less man, 833k subscribers? It was only a few months back that you said 633k was too many. You need to start pissing more people off 😛 The graph is going the wrong way!
He might get that golden play symbol the boring way. Uncle Bumblefuck is the genuine article. No chinesium there... well he probably has enough schmoo from his travels and trials that he is partially chinesium so I digress.
i bought a similar multiprocess vulcan mig/tig/arc 220 based on this review. ive loved it. great lil welder and i used the money saved to buy a tank, regulator, gas, pedal, and gun. been a solid welder, gets weekly use.
First let me say upfront I work at HFT. Now let me tell you I love your reviews. No BS straight facts for me to help my customers. I feel like i can repeat everything you say so I can sell the right tool to the right person. Also you are right in a lot of ways. HFT is growing, we sell a ton during the summer months... but in winter it crashes. Why because the home owner that buys a Chicago Electric drill to hang a couple of things in the summer does not buy shit all winter. We are expanding our lines working to getting pro-level tools. It will probably be a slow build up... but yes we want to go head to head with Snap-on, Dewalt and the other big guys. I Loved your review on Bauer. Now I want to see you take a part a Hercules, and or an Earthquake 20V impact.
I want to say, I'm loving what Harbor Freight has been doing recently. They are targeting openly and honestly 3 different niches, the "I need to use it once" crowd, the plebian consumer, and the discerning Chad prosumer.
The Earthquake did fair well, not worth the money they charged for it and the shitty 90day warranty. 4 3/4yr later im finally sending in my 2767 Milwaukee, trigger hangs up and battery loose. Its been put thru the ringer for a construction mechanic in the field. I bet they just send me back a referbed gun 🤷♂️
English is not my first language. Watching this gentleman makes me rewind and re-rewind to understand his particular dialect. He is not the usual ones I watch with trucks with firearms and x flag with stars. More often I have to pull out my Webster Dictionary when he speaks. Technical vocabulary but use "sniffer" instead of nostrils. His dialect is fun with curse words. I admire this gentleman like that of the Old Tony character.
You showing us teaching Chickadee a skill in the shop is more entertaining than the BOLTR's...and I love those! That kid is going to be not only marketable, but also unstoppable. My garage isn't as grand as yours, but my daughter gets to tinker with me, and it's pure joy to experience.
Love watching your videos! You not only teach a lot but you are funny as hell. I work at harbor freight tools I’m the supervisor logistics. And would love to see more of our tools reviewed by you.
Currently sat in a recliner next to my little trouble maker in hospital while he has some much needed sleep. Had a horrible few days and still laughing to your banter, thank you! I needed this.
Being in electronics all of my life I was very familiar with soldering. Against all advice I started with TIG welding since it seemed to be the closest to soldering. I am so glad I did because my first welds were way better than I had hoped. No splattering, nearly silent and NO SLAG to have to chip away. 15 years later and I have no reason to try anything else, although I admit that MIG welding would be faster, but I don't mind taking my time.
Stopped at 11:33 as you finished talking to your daughter to write this comment. Sir, you are such an awesome dad! I just had to put that out there. Keep up the great content! I use this welder at work and I was too afraid to take it apart until I watched this video. Thanks!!!
totally agree on learning stick welding first.that's how I was taught.first gas welding then stick then tig.when done in that order you will have everything you need to smoothly transition from one type to another.we never even got into mig because he knew we would figure it out in 10 minuets.
"Being able to weld just pays dividends" ... You just ask Billy Connolly! Glasgow welder born and bred and became a stand up comedian, correction, became a SUPERB (say it with a Scots accent please) comedian and used tons of welding experience as material for his comedy. Bit like AVE no doubt! LOL 😂😂
Wait, he was a welder? God, I remember his HBO special back in the 80's where he talks about farting on an airplane. Ah, memories of being a child in the 80's, born to hippy parents.
I have learned a lot from watching these Ave videos I work as a maint tech with none schooling for a lot of my day to day but a lot of the tricks he shows in his videos I have used and had fairly good luck if you do read your comments thank you for all of your videos they have helped quite a bit please keep them coming
To find out what the DC voltage is if you know the AC volts for a full bridge rectifier, just multiply by 1.41, so for your 220V input, it should be 310v DC Looking at the manual (available online) rectified DC into an inverter then rectified again (same as switch mode PSU)
Your balance of nonsense cussing and incredible knowledge is something so amazing. If i had a choice of someone to ask shop questions to, you would be my second choice my friend.
Ave, i absolutely love watching your videos. When i hear you interact with your littleun it reminds me how wonderful it is to be a dad and for that i thank you
I have used the very best slope controlled TIG welders on the market doing nuclear work on Navy submarine power plants. I'm one of the last 4956 coded Nuclear Power Plant Welders left in the Navy and probably the most senior Hull Maintenance Technician Master Chief still active duty. 1 of 18 on the planet. That's a HTCM for you Sailors out there. (Retiring with 30years in Sep.) I bought the Hazard Fraught buzz box and it works fine for my garage. I say start gas welding, then go to stick, then run aluminum MIG then TIG. I did ten months of training at C-1 weld school in San Diego back in 89'. I could officially turn on the machine and strike an arc. Now I sit behind a desk and wish I was in the shop. Love your show and keep em coming.
Love the teaching moment interaction with your daughter, looking forward to the day she does her reviews. I learned French in France and Belgium took my ear a second to pickup the difference in Canadian French..as your daughter said, “Coool”
I have the older black box HF 170amp flux/mig welder which I bought ~3 years ago for roughly $170. I'm at least on my 10th spool now and did the capacitor mod last year which can be found on the WeldingWeb forum. It works well with Lincoln .030/.035 wire. I also did a gun upgrade because the stock gun was complete crap. Just remember that if you are a noob, you will also need to invest roughly $500 more in helmet, gloves, apron, chipper, better ground clamp (I got a magnetic type) and many other things like a bandsaw (I have the red HF horizontal one). I also initially upgraded the stock power cord on the welder to 10ft of 10/3 600v SOOW as well ran a new dedicated 30amp circuit from my service panel to run the welder (its 220v). That and I also built a 25ft extension cord of the same cable. For all of this I used Hubbell 30amp 250v 3-wire plugs. Welding is cool as frig, but it's not cheap to get into. That said though I really needed it and so it's easily paid for itself several times over.
I love the excitement in your daughter's voice every time she comes in to see you! "Wanna learn how to weld?" "YEAH!" She's gonna do great things when she grows up, well done sir!
Learning how to mig weld aluminum before steel is also very helpful. Totally different beasts, but I’ve seen first hand some struggle to go one way versus the other.
Awesome, and extremely detailed in-depth review of this welder. Youre awesome! I was just thinking about picking one up. For the price I'm getting on it I'm definitely gonna snag it now.
Ave, you are hilarious and very knowledgable at the same time. I work at a place that makes high-end electronics and your knowledge of electronic component terminology is impressive.
check out the new Doyle branded pliers and such. seems like some mac ripoffs. really nice tools. but not cheap in HFT prices you're looking at $10 -15 per tool. I really think they want that Sears marketplace in the midgrade line of tools and they have the brick and mortar to back it up.
They were already crushed. They took too long to shift from catalogue to mall store, just in time for mall stores to be dead in favor of online shopping. If they had just bought websites and threw away the stores, they could have survived, but they were over extended maintaining obsolete delivery systems that take a lot of overhead.
I like how you break things down & analyze products with your wealth of knowledge, experience & expertise! You are the skucoms of the tear-down guru! 😉👍
Agree with the shitty factory gun on the 211. Mine made it a year before the gun crapped out. Replaced with a tweco and it's been an amazing machine since.
Any place I worked a air filter on a welder case would plug in a few days or a week at most. It was a check list item for our shop to take the sheet metal case off every welder every 6 months and them blow out.
Welding is the greatest skill a person can have on a job application. It has got me 4 jobs and not one of them involved welding but I am the only one in my team that has that skill giving me more job security during layoffs. I do absolutely agree about learning stick welding first. I WILL not MIG instead I will always STICK or TIG on my own projects. The curve is steep at first but hold to it. Awesome video AVE. My wife even watched it with me as she wants to learn. She gets a kick of you teaching your kid to weld!
Hahahah. "Welding should sound like bacon, but if it smells like bacon, you're on fire!" Made me laugh out loud while watching this at work. Not cool...
Finally thank you for this video. Also I'm still very happy I bought my HH 210 MVP. It will still be welding up a storm long after this inverter machine has belched out its black puff of death, probably one month after the warranty (which you have to pay extra for) runs out. Looking forward to more videos on it in the future.
I think HF is trying to step up their game for one main reason, to become the new Craftsman and the hardware part of Sears. Craftsman first got a licensing deal with Ace Hardware, when it was a Sears owned and sold brand, then it was sold off to Stanley Black & Decker with a license deal for Sears to produce their own line for so many years. Outside of Sears and Craftsman, there's really no store owned product lines that aren't sold beside other companies, other than HF. Not to mention that in the past half decade, Sears has been selling at least the yellow brand in stores and advertising the same brand in their largest ads of the year. Plus Sears is basically on life support at this point, and I wouldn't be surprised if that plug is pulled within the next half decade; they losing Kmart and Craftsman, now all they have is a marketplace of a website and their credit card offers, also wouldn't be surprised if Kenmore is sold off soon. Now that HF is really the last store to own their own brands and sell only their brands, they probably need to step up to avoid losing too much to brands like Bosch and SB&D, and the other brands that manufacture and relabel for big box stores like Kobalt and Husky. It's a logical move to take initial profit loss to gain recognition in an industry that has basically become an oligarchy. Even if HF's brands share off-coast manufacturers with other no-name brands, or even the few one-off cheap tools from big-name brands, as long as they actually sell good tools at good prices, they should survive just fine. And most, if not all of us, that watch this channel have known HF to be the cheap but bad tool brands, but it'd be nice to see them keep up with the better tools and gain some positive recognition.
I've had my Miller 211 for about 10 years and never had one single problem. It's ran flawlessly and the ol' blue box has glued lots of steel and aluminum.
Completely spot on with your opinion on learning stick before mig, im sheet metal fabricator and its always been a huge plus knowing stick prior to tig or mig
