Mig welder advice?

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Originally Posted by 2stroke

WIA are now made in China, still okay but sadly not a patch on earlier ones. They're a simpler design and should be fairly cheap to fix (inverter cards can be $600 for the higher tech inverter type ones like Unimig or BOC) I settled on Lincoln 180 due to better quality wirefeed roller assembly and solid old school design. Plus they were all around the $1000 mark.

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is that ALL their welders or just the single phase smaller stuff?

Only talking about the 190 if you mean the WIA made in China, (since that was the one I was looking at, didn't ask about others) I did do a lot of mig welder repairs at a large fab shop until just a few years ago and they had old WIA units from the 60s and 70s and they were bullet proof and very cheap to fix, mostly fans, leads and feeders. Then they decided to get a batch of new WIA Fabricators, about 375A from memory, the first one needed repair inside the first month, fan failures mostly but you had to pull half the power source apart to change it, not so cheap to fix. I still think the WIA 190 would be okay but not at the same price as the Lincoln for me.