New TIG welder & Welding cart

There have been many times during this build where having a TIG welder would have been a better fit than my MIG welder for work on eg. captive nuts, thinner metals, smaller brackets and body panel work. It's late in this project but I've finally purchased one.

The Lincoln Electric PowerCraft 205 DC is a compact and lightweight inverter TIG machine with good standard features such as High Frequency ignition, pre/post gas flow times, ramp currents, spot TIG and adjustable pulse frequency and ratio. Being DC (Direct Current) only, it cannot weld aluminium however there's only been a couple of times where I've needed to weld aluminium and I simply outsourced that work. 

I needed to fabricate a new welding cart for my now two welders. The design called for the MIG & TIG welders to be mounted side by side, as with the two D-sized gas bottles (mixed gas for MIG, argon for TIG) with some mounts for strapping the bottles in. It also needed hangers on either side for storing the torch and ground cables, an open area for my helmet and a drawer for gloves/accessories/consumables as well as somewhere to hold TIG filler rods. I purchased 15m of 30x30x3mm angle steel for it, and ended up using all but about 1m of it!

Before prep/paint :

After a quick sand and paint job, everything was fitted. The old cart for my MIG welder had four cheap small caster wheels which made it cumbersome to move everything around. This time I fitted 150mm fixed wheels at the rear and braked casters at the front to move the estimated 105kg around. There is a significant difference to how easy it now is to roll the cart around the workshop compared to the old cart.

Filler rod storage next to the bottles :

A useful addition I also made is the double 15Amp outlet at the base of the cart, which both welders plug into. The cart then has a single extension cable (orange cable seen in the photos above) to plug into one my 15Amp power outlets in the workshop. This is more convenient than having to unravel both cables if I want to swap between MIG & TIG machines.

All I have to do now is allocate hours and hours of time for practicing TIG welding and getting familiar with the machine settings! After about 4 hours of practice though, I started to get some good results. 

Exhaust tube (no filler rod) :

4mm steel plate :

Boss welded to plate :

Low amperage with the spot weld function even makes welding of thin really thin (0.6mm) trimming knife blades seem easy :

The TIG even allows me to clean up some not-so-great MIG welds that I did some time ago, by simply melting and pushing the weld puddle around.