I traded for a minty Airco PhaseArc 350 mig welder last week with the idea of maybe either being able to run it from a 5hp rotary phase converter that I run my machine tools in my hobby shop with, or selling it and purchasing a single phase machine.
Yesterday morning, I wired it up, using a 12/3 100' extension cord. I figured I might as well try it worst case. (yes, I know..no safety ground..shrug)
To make a long story short, it worked beautifuly. I spent about 5 minutes doing nothing but filling the top of a chunk of plate with a
6" continious back and forth bead of .035 wire, thinking that something should get warm, or reach welding time % and it just kept feeding and burning with that marvelous frying bacon sound, with good puddle and penetration. I sectioned a chunk of the plate with an abrasive saw and penetration was very good.I then loaded a spool of .045 dual shield and did the same thing. It took a fair amount more volts of course, and every thing worked fine. I do have an issue with the Arcomatic lV wire feeder with the bigger wire, as its not the proper feed roller for that size I dont think..but all in all it burned well. The .035 burned best with the meter settings at 21-22 volts and the welding output amp meter showed around 100-125 amps during welding. Today Ill put a amp meter on the line and see what the actual draw on the RPC is Everything remained nice and cool, even the horrendously long and undersized extension cord remained cool.
A Rotary Phase converter is easy to build, lots of plans on the net, and they can be built quite cheaply.
So picking up a decent commercial 3ph mig welder cheaply (since lots of folks are going to inverter machines) is a pretty viable way to get a decent commercial grade MIG welder and being able to run it on single phase home power.
I dont have any 3ph stick or tig machines, so I cannot give any data on what one of those would take to run.
YMMV of course.
Gunner, off to weld up a cart for that big bastard
It's better to be a red person in a blue state than a blue person in a red state. As a red person, if your blue neighbors turn into a mob at least you have a gun to protect yourself. As a blue person, your only hope is to appease the red mob with herbal tea and marinated tofu.
(Phil Garding)