It's Ray from Pro Shaper Workshop in Charlton, Massachusetts
Look what we got. We have a new Vulcan 205 welder to try out
So Max did the heavy job of taking it out of the box. All I have to do is just take its underwear off here and we'll get this thing cranking
up in a few minutes. So if you're new to my channel, remember you've got to like, subscribe and hit that little
notification bell. Tell your friends. Alright, first impression
Looks pretty good. I would say about 50 pounds. 50 pounds gets more and more heavy as you get older too
Let me tell you. I just happen to have a Vulcan welder stand
This actually belongs to my volunteer. And I said, Jim, that's your welder stand
He says, no, I don't think so. So now my welder stand, I guess
So we'll get these boxes opened up. We'll get it all set up
And then we'll come back. That's a nice looking foot pedal. That's a high quality foot pedal
Usually the problem on the foot pedal is they take a lot of the juice getting kicked around
and the wire will be stressed right here. It would be nice to have a little metal arm around there where it goes through and that
would protect the wire. If it's going to break, it's going to break right there
But that's a pretty nice little pedal. I guess. See what this looks like
That's a gauge rather than a flow meter. That's okay
That worked fine. There's the adjustment. Now let's see what the torch looks like
I think it's a number 17 torch
You get common parts for that. It's easy to fit tips and all that other stuff on
I think this is dual voltage. What do we have here? Okay
That looks like a 220 plug there, but I don't use that format
So that'll be a problem. And that looks like a 220 plug too
Oh, oh, oh no. There we go. That's the right one. That's the right plug for that end
Oh, okay. Now that's what the interface is with the welder itself
My mistake. And that's your hose. What do we got here
A Vulcan sheet metal gauge. I don't need this. I have my eye-trometer
It's a nice made piece. Has the Vulcan name on it. It's pretty cool
So we'll run it on 220. We'll get better results out of 220
Usually the full power at 220. We'll do a reduced power at 110
My eight or nine foot cord. That's pretty good range. And that goes in one way
So it's got a little jog in it here. And a straddle means our odds are in line
This is interesting. A lot of the welders today, they're European standard
And they have to have the switch in the back. This looks like it has the switch in the front
I like that. I like the switch in the front. It's more user-friendly. I don't know why they put the switch in the back
Doesn't make sense to me. All right. We'll leave that in the zero
The 110 foot cord. And then this. Some of them. They have a latch to ground those into the positive side
So let's see. No. Yeah. The torch wants to be on the negative side, which I don't understand
But I guess that's the way they do them. That looks like a pretty robust ground cable hookup
The clamp looks heavy enough. That one went a lot easier than the torch side
Where's this one hook up? Right in the front? I hope. This has got a nice long cord with it
Really long. This is a different zip code on this one. So generally these go in one way
They use a key somehow. Let me see the key. Okay. The key is in one spot
I don't see the key. The key looks right at the top. Okay
I guess it was right at the top. There's a little white dot on there that usually guides it, which was nice
Now, this lead is probably a 12 footer, a 10 to 12 footer
So I don't know why they have such a much longer foot pedal
The foot pedal's got to be... Let's see how long that is
The foot pedal's got to be 20 foot at least. All right
You've got it all set up on the stand here. Got everything hooked in
This too, they had a nice little picture display to make sure
And when you do the stick welding, the ground is over here, and then the positive is on this side
and vice versa when you're TIG welding. So TIG welding, this is the negative side, and the ground is the positive side
So we've got the gas on and plugged in for the first time
And we have the stop button right in the front here, right here
See if it lights up. It lights up. Now, we've got to set all the settings. I have no clue what the settings are going to be yet here
So I might have to refer it to the book. I'm not sure
So what do we got here? Okay. That's amperage. So what do we have here
We've got TIG, DC is what we want. Let me just deal first
All right, that's DC stick, AC, TIG. Okay, there's your three options
So AC TIG, DC TIG, and stick welding. So we're going to be doing the DC TIG first here
and then we'll check this one out. What's this one do? This is pre-flow, and .03, we'll give it, let's see, try that again
Pre-flow, we'll try five. Post-flow, we'll give that a little bit more
Give this six. This is just the initial setting. Sometimes they change
No, this is just incremental here. Okay. Pulse on, off. Right now I'll get it off
Amperage, we're doing 20 gauge, 35,000. We'll give it 35, one amp for every thickness of the metal, every thousandth of a metal
Pre-flow, post-flow, pulse on, off. Okay, so that's pretty straightforward. Nice interface, pretty easy
I guess there's no memory in this one, but I don't see it yet anyway
So it should fire up. Now, on the torch, it came with just the standard
The torch is a little heavy, but you can put a better, lighter torch if you wanted to
It's very easy. It probably costs another couple hundred bucks to get a lighter torch
So it didn't have a gas lens, so I put the gas lens in
and I had to dig through my box of accessories to find this little filler piece in here
because this would seal up nice, and I don't like the long knob on the end
That's what he said. So I got the little button knob on there, and I use 2% mantinated, 330 seconds
So we'll fire this up and see what it does. This is all new line and everything, new regulator
so you want to purge that all out to make sure you get all of your oxygen out of there
So I got the post flow going now. I'll let that run for a little bit
How are you getting that to run? Well, I got to push the paddle down, and that activates the flow, the argon flow
and then I got a post flow of, I think, six seconds
We'll hit it probably ten times to clean it out good here
All right. It looks like we are going to have to shield the electronics here, because it kills our sound
So we're trying the pink foil aluminum hat, see if that will shield it
All right. Here we go. Let's see if it knocks the sound out
Mark, give me a report. Is it out? Nope. Breakthrough, the aluminum shielding on the wireless mic works
I'm going to run my first bead here. Again, I got a 332nd rod, 2% laminated, and the welding rod is 030 steel
I'm going to run my second bead here. All right
I'm going to do some fusion pass here, and 20 gauge is a little tricky because it burns through really easy
The only thing I don't like in here is this cord. It's pretty heavy, and it's twisting me, and it wants to go right there
So I definitely want to put another torque on here at some point
It's just too cumbersome. All right. So let's try a fusion weld right there
I tapped it out. All right
So that's pretty sweet. Now I'm going to try doing a fusion weld with the pulse
I have to read the book, but it looks like the pulse is either on or off, and there doesn't seem to be any adjustment on it
so I might be wrong. I'm going to check. We'll just try it with the pulse here
That's a whole new ballgame. That's beautiful. I might not have got penetration on this thing
It's not too bad. It's probably going to go up with the amperage just a little bit
This one was open too over here, so I probably could crank it to 40 amps
but I'm really impressed with that pulse on this machine. Just cleaning up the aluminum blanks here
We got 060 aluminum. We'll clamp this up. We're going to try running a couple of beads, even without the pulse
and this is with straight eyes on. I don't intend this video to be a definitive critique or examination of the Vulcan welder
It's just basically scratching the surface here to learn the interface to show the hookup and setup on it and what my initial impression is
but we'll do a really good video later on. We'll compare it head-to-head with the Everlast
My initial impression, this is a better welder than the Everlast, and it was less money too
So, let me get an aluminum rod, and we'll try some aluminum welding
Now, for doing the aluminum, you have to change the settings. This is your mode, and right now I'm on zone 3 mode
There's the DC, stick welding, and AC. So, you choose the mode
That's the mode now, AC, and then this is all your options here
You have pre-flow. I put it at 0.6. You've got, this is the frequency. I've got it at 160, and that's as high as it'll go
And then the percentage, this is the cleaning versus the penetration, and I think 70 is where we want to be on this machine
I'll know in a few minutes. And then you have post-flow. I've got it at 6.1
We have the pulse off, and I have 66 amps, and that's the pre-flow
So, it's a simpler interface than the Everlast, but we'll get into that again when we do the really in-depth one
So, let's just do our first aluminum weld with the Vulcan now
So, here's my cleaning action. I've got really nice cleaning action. It's a great start up on a high-frequency
And not enough penetration. I'm going to have to go up on my amps a little bit
That went up to 80 amps. We'll put a weld right next to that one and see what happens
Much better. 80 amps for a split status. Again, some penetration. Let's do some patch here. We'll just do some patch
Again, some penetration. Let's do some patch here. We'll just do some patch
We'll just do some patch. Okay, so now we've got it hooked up to the Agon Helium
I'm going to purge that Agon out again here a couple times through
It's a 50-50 mix, and I'll do a little bead right here
Alright, so that should have purged the Agon out. Now, let's see if we can ease this up
It's a little open, so I don't know if I can. Okay
I had a little gap there, and maybe I picked up a little on the rod, too
I think I rang the rod a little bit. It wasn't the best of tests, because it wasn't even
It was open, so oxygen was coming through. Let me grind off this aluminum, and we'll be all set
Okay. Let's go around the other side
Let me just clean that for a second
Okay, so I did add rod, and this was really not a good test
I'd probably want to do that again. We'll let that cool down so I don't bend it hot, because when it's bent hot
aluminum is a little bit crumbly when it's hot, so it might not have been fair for that first test
which was the fusion, and this was add rod. What I'm going to do now is just, again, just to do a test drive, is to do the pulse function
So we're going to get that going. Let's see. It's a simple on-off
You can't adjust the pulse rate as far as I know, but I'll have to read the book
I'm going to run a bead with the pulse over here and see what happens
So I cooled it off here, and of course I added rod on this one. Let's see if this one, what this one does
So far it looks good, because there's a lot more heat in this one too
and it's doing exactly what it should be doing. If your weld is good, it'll break on the side of the weld
Now, the first one broke, but again, I was hot, and it was just a fusion weld
There's no rod added. If I ground this down, it would be actually a better test
but this isn't the definitive test of this machine. This is just the unboxing and familiarizing myself with a few of the functions of it
and its various parameters that it has, and overall, I have to come away with
I'm very impressed with the welder. It's a very nice welder. It might become my favorite aluminum welder
It may be the steel too. I don't know. I wondered why I've waited so long to buy the Vulcan
So we'll make another video doing a more intensive test of it
and also a direct comparison with the Everlast, the Everlaster over here now
But this weld, of course, was done also, I have to say, that I'm adding the argon
which creates more heat. Aluminum loves heat to weld properly, so we've got a lot of testing to do
So I hope you enjoyed the video. It's Ray from Pro Shaper Workshop in Charlton, Massachusetts
and please remember to subscribe and give us the likes and hit that little notification bell
If you want to be a master of this craft, the number one thing you have to strive for is patience
Prestige is measurement, and persistence, and metal is clay