Harbor Freight spot welders..Any good?

Putting the full quarters on my car and may do the same with the GS 350 car later. Was at Harbor freight today looking at their spot welders. 1 was 120v and the other was 240v. Are these good machines? What's the better voltage? I assume the 240v is better but I would have to make a longer cord as I only have 2 220 plugs in my front of my garage. After these cars are done,I most likely won't use it much if ever. Prices are 10 bucks difference.

 

I used the 120v one that my dad had when I did the metal work on my son's first car, a '79 Regal. It worked good for that. I ran it off of my generator.

Ken

 

I bought one of the 120V flux core welders from them for around $75 a few years ago. Probably works good if you know how to weld, but all my welds look like a big ole pile of cottage cheese. Works good for sheet metal work since all you're doing are spot welds. Here are spot welds from my HF welder when I welded a GS hood skin off a crushed hood onto a skylark frame (old spot welds were cut out using a spot weld cutter, which leaves sorta big holes I had to fill). A little bondo and it was all good.

 

Unless you have a $15k+ Prospot machine with $10k in attachments they are about useless

Drill or punch 5/16 holes and puddle weld them

Practice on scraps....start on the edge of the hole pop the trigger to light your mask and then move around the hole..if your welder is set correctly with 0.23 or .025 wire you can walk it rite around with a curl towards to the center as you pull out

If you using .030 wire you may need to spilt the weld into two halves....I DA my puddle welds with 80grit 75% of the time granted I've probably made 100k of them by now but I could take a 16 yrold girl or boy that didn't know what a welder was and have them burning nice ones in a 1.5hr class period...

 

I had one of the fully decked out Prospot machines at school....$36k worth....used it once on a bedside demonstration....it was nice..done just like the factory.....but like I Said $36k

 

I have & have used my 120V Miller I bought new in the early 90's for fixing NOS fenders & on quarters & it works well. I have lots of different style tongs for it incl. for doing wheel lips on quarters. Welds are a little smaller dia. than factory. In retrospect I wish I'd have bought the 220V & might get one to try & see how it does in comparison. Both are always avail. on eBay.

Also have a very HD Miller unit I bought used & have never used but looks like something GM would've had back in the day. Tongs are even water cooled. Unfortunately only have the set it came w/so may be of limited use & w/o a tool balancer you'd never be able to even pick it up to position accurately or use for more than a couple welds.

As Ethan said, Pro Spot is the best way to go but big $. They come up on eBay too but are still big $.

 

For what it is worth, the 110V and 220V welders are both the same machine, the 220V machine just has the proper 220 volt plug.

 

I have a lightly used 12o V and it seems the duty cycle is a little lacking. If I could do it over I would try the 220V .

 

Thx. I was wondering if that was the case.

 

They are timed for 22ga steel I bet.. can you change the timing cycle?

 

China man doesn't know sheet beyond 22 exist