Now inside the machine you have your drive motor and drive roller wheel. Open it up and take the wire out, but be cautious because normally these wires will spring everywhere and you can waste all your wire so make sure to tie it up. Release the tension on your wire and I’ll show you the difference between the drive rollers on hard wire and on flux core. Now switch your leads like shown in the image. It doesn’t impregnate itself into the material so make sure your polarity is set right. If you’ve ever welded with the polarity the wrong way it looks really crusty, dry and hard and the weld kind of sits up on top of the material. How polarity works is when you switch to hard wire and start welding, your ground works as a magnet to the hard wire that comes out of the machine so when you weld it penetrates and pulls it in. Ground goes back to ground and positive back to positive. When you reverse polarity with hardwire it switches it. Whenever you’re welding with flux core you need to remember that right now your positive lead is running negative and your ground becomes your positive. Here are the steps described when switching over: I’m going to show you the process of switching the machine so you can see what your 110 welder will do if you want to run the flux or shielded gas. Remember when you’re getting ready to weld to wear a long sleeve shirt because this flux core is extremely bright and will flash burn you quickly. For those of you that haven’t taken the Welder 101 course, included in the course are metal tabs I send to you ready for you to practice welding different types of joints.

Now we’re going to weld with flux core so you can see what it looks like. I’ll plan to show you how dual shielding works in the future. The penetration here is unbelievable and when finished, it leaves a flux slag on top of the weld. What this is is a flux core that runs consumable shielded gas where you can weld some big projects with. On your flux core there is another wire I call dual shield.

If you were to try and weld with hardwire when its windy your gas will be thrown all over the place with impurities on your weld and nothing but porosity which can be a train wreck. You can weld wherever you want and you can weld with wind. Welding with flux does have its benefits though. Welding with this wire can be tough to make your welds consistently look good because it gets smoky, slag bounces everywhere, isn’t a clean weld and requires more clean up after. There’s no need to use gas when you weld because of the flux inside. Its called flux core because there is flux in the core of the wire. If you plan on buying a 110 welder be sure to check that it has a provision for gas because the option will be there if you ever need it when you want to run hard wire through your machine. 110V are great for repair work and wrought iron welding. Duty cycle is important if you plan on doing a lot of welding. For example, if I turn this welder all the way up and start welding, it will probably go for one minute before tripping a breaker. It will usually trip a breaker and the time can vary depending on how high you turn up the machine. This 110V welder I have here has a duty cycle of 12 minutes within the hour meaning you can weld continuously for 12 minutes before the machine shuts off. If you’re not sure what duty cycle means I’ll explain. This will up the duty cycle of your machine. If you’re just getting into welding and are looking for a machine to get you started I recommend finding a welder with the option to run 110V or 220V.

I’ll be using the same 110V welder for both so you can directly see how they perform and weld differently. I’ll go over everything you need to know between the two. Every welder has their preferences, but I like to use both depending on the circumstances I am in. Flux core and hard wire MIG welding has it’s benefits and differences.

220 flux core welder