"Ready Welder" Owners?

[keeney]

\"Ready Welder\" Owners?

I am thinking of purchasing a Ready Welder for occasional repairs and hobby fabrication of thick aluminum sectioned things like docks and boat lifts.

The concept of using automotive or marine style lead-acid batteries for welding voltage seems sound enough. I am more concerned with the durability and robustness of the actual Ready-Welder unit.

Anybody with real experience using this product?

Does it feed reliably?

Is it durable?

Anything else to buy besides the wire, gas, and a regulator?

Any other ideas on the least expensive way to weld thick aluminum at 150 to 200 amps?.

- Rick

 

[Ford960]

Re: \"Ready Welder\" Owners?

I've used my ReadyWelderII 1000ADP for over a year and it performs reliably every time both in aluminum and flux cored steel. When I built my stretched limo club car golf cart I ran 5 rolls of 4043 aluminum wire through it using the cart batteries for power. Connecting 3 8volt batteries in series gave me 24 volts and I didn't have to recharge the batteries the entire month that I used them.
The RWII doesn't have a duty cycle so you can weld as long as there's wire, battery power, and you can hold the trigger.
I can also take it on the golf cart then use the batteries to weld and ride the golf cart back home.
It's every bit as durable and relialble as the Westinghouse SP100 spool gun that I owned back in the early 80's and cost half as much. You can find good deals on them on Ebay, I got mine through Vulcan Welding with no shipping for less than $400.
I'd buy one again.
Visit the website if you haven't already, there's also a forum but it's kinda slow.
The only thing that I would fix is the wire speed control knob, it is right where your right thumb hits and turns it while welding. I think that they have addressed this problem on the recent models but I sometimes remove the knob after setting the speed.

 

[Reg]

Re: \"Ready Welder\" Owners?

I have one.
YES, it is durable and works well.
On two 12 volt marine deep cycle batteries you had better be ready to move when you strike that arc, coz its gonna send some heat and wire. I also bought a couple of big 6 volt batteries so that I could double them up in series parallel with the two 12 volt marine batteries and weld at 18 volts, but I still havn't actually tried that yet. BTW, the reason for two was to put them back in series for re-charging.
It is WAY less expensive than a "regular" MIG machine of comparable capacity and unless you're in a "production shop" situation it will keep up with you.

I've considered putting two battery chargers in series across the two 12 volt batteries in series to keep them topped up while I weld, but that hasn't been necessary yet.