I have been looking and looking and looking and I just can't find anything for Pulse MIG under $3K + $1k add-on except the imports. There are two of them, but I never heard of either one I started looking.
I know! I know! Buy good or buy twice.
I've read a couple reports of guys who used them for about six months and then they died. I just want to know if they got decent welds out of them for those six months?
Everlast is one (and of the two the one I would be more likely to gamble on), and Longevity is the other.
I have bought tools specifically for one job, then sold it. The cost/profit justification was there. You just have to measure them and decide. If a machine only lasts 500 hours, and it is used three hours a week, that machine, by my math, would be cost effective, if it brought in enough per hour to make it profitable at the end. If that same machine was used 50 hours a week, and had to be replaced at the end of ten weeks, then the cost would have to be factored with the amount charged, and the cost of replacement. And somewhere in there, the nearly 100% depreciation of trying to sell a Hyazaki welder that's "really been a good welder. When it works". I always liked to figure long term, overbuy, overkill, and at least have something at the end that was running that I could sell for a decent price. And in the meantime, be able to find consumables, and not have a lot of times when I had to turn down work because the "welder is in the shop."
Maybe, if you bought the machine, you could find work for it. A friend of mine got a huge settlement, and went into the CNC business of doing stainless and aluminum. His Trumpf 4' x 10' laser table was $750k. All the other Trumpf punching/bending/cnc/cadcam stuff was equally expensive. He was struggling. He called his guy at Trumpf, and explained that he was struggling. The Trumpf man told him to sit tight, and he would make some phone calls. He did. The Trumpf man got him work with Caterpillar and Ford cutting out widgets, and he had to add a whole nuther 8 hour shift at the plant.
Sell? With something like that I would figure it to go to salvage afterwards. My thought is I can do a heck of a lot of work in six months of useage. Enough to easily replace the unit with a better one if I were so inclined.
So I am guessing you don't have any experience with the welds from the specific machines I mentioned then. P.S. I am looking at the I-MIG 250P.
P.S. My experience has been I can't ever find anybody willing to pay more than scrap price to me for a used anything, so that blue paint job has to earn its own keep in the shop.
No experience with their MIG stuff , but I've got an Everlast EX250 TIG umit and it works very well . Quality appears to be on a par with the Big Names ... and they're using exactly the same technology . Red and Blue were both about triple what I paid for new and double for used . I'd buy it again .
I'm one of the happy ones . Busted the pot in the pedal because of a missing stop bolt . I asked them to ship the brokan part , they sent me a whole new pedal unit .
Red-d-arc rents some pretty nice stuff. Twice I have had shops I was working at rent machine from them. A Syncrowave 350LX, and A Dynasty 350DX. Both were lovely machines.
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