Welding Tips and Tricks

Hello all,

I'm new to welding as a hobbyist. I'm an Electrician by trade, work in a data center, building customer rental cages. Work on design of customer layouts and such. I use CAD on a near-daily basis, and started tinkering with Fusion, mostly to cheat on laying out odd ball cuts. Currently have a lincoln handy core fcaw, outgrowing it much faster than I expected, but I didn't wanna spend a ton of money on a hobby I wasn't sure I was going to take to. I do have a few questions for the community, which I'm sure I'll be directed to the proper forum threads but here it goes:

Would the lincoln 210 MP be a good official starter welder for someone trying to get into true mig, and dabbling in stick and tig (tig interests me so much but I'm not sure if or when I will get there)? And if not, then is there a comparable priced reliable welder with the same functions and abilities?

I live just on the north side of Route 78 in New Jersey and I'm having a hell of a time trying to find a place to BUY scrap metal so I have to waste money on fresh steel for practicing. But as I call around to local scrap yards I'm finding that none of the ones I've called sell to the public, seems to be a trend. Not sure if it's just a NJ thing or what, but I always hear people on YT talking about stopping by their scrap yard and buying metal to weld with. Am I searching the wrong thing, is it a semantics thing? Should I be searching salvage yard, or junk yard instead? I would love some guidance on this.

Now that it's finally spring, its warm enough for me to weld in the garage with the door open and a fan on. So the fumes arent so much of an issue. However in the winter what I've been doing is using my shop vac, without a filter, and installed a couple metal screens on the inlet hose to keep slag and embers from entering the vacuum. Seems to keep my fumes down a little bit but I certainly don't wanna spring for a fume extractor. So I guess my question is, what do all of you entry-ish level hobbyists do to combat flux core fumes, and will true mig be less of an issue for nasty fumes?


Thanks for you're future support.

Now that it's finally spring, its warm enough for me to weld in the garage with the door open and a fan on. So the fumes arent so much of an issue. However in the winter what I've been doing is using my shop vac, without a filter, and installed a couple metal screens on the inlet hose to keep slag and embers from entering the vacuum. Seems to keep my fumes down a little bit but I certainly don't wanna spring for a fume extractor. So I guess my question is, what do all of you entry-ish level hobbyists do to combat flux core fumes, and will true mig be less of an issue for nasty fumes?

Any season I weld with the garage doors open and wear a respirator.

Louie1961 wrote:Any season I weld with the garage doors open and wear a respirator.

Thanks, yeah I was thinking that, I'm just going to need to find a nice helmet that'll fit my 3m respirator underneath. Any suggestions? What ppe setup do you use?

I am using a Lincoln Viking 3350 4C helmet https://www.weldingsuppliesfromioc.com/ ... et-k3034-4

I use a 3M 7500 half face piece, down draft exhaust respirator with the 2297 "pancake" filters...the downdraft is super nice for keeping your helmet from fogging up

https://www.amazon.com/3M-Facepiece-Res ... 178&sr=8-6

https://www.amazon.com/3M-Advanced-Part ... 168&sr=8-5

I also use a fan if I am stick welding, to be sure to blow the excess smoke and fumes out the door.

Thanks Louie,
Yeah I have the same respirator. I was using the OV cartridge filter combos. I'm assuming the filters you linked are adequate for the welding? The pancakes would def fit better under there.