My political act for the day was to run down fortymile to the Deuce of Clubs and pick out my first angle grinder.

I looked into welders too while I was there, but it turns out that a Lowe’s is not the place to look for ways to work with metal. Wood yes, PVC and all that. But they only care about stocking even metal pipe inasmuch as it applies to plumbing.

I ate an incredible kale salad at the one place down there that almost passes for a foodie haven.

And I did get snowed on a little.

Then home and research. It turns out that traditional stick welding is still done the same way, and generally requires a heavy financial investment. Likewise for oxy-acetylene–I’m not running around gathering two tanks of specialized gas just to be able to lay down a couple of welds on the rack. But in addition to these old favorites, there are new kinds of welding; the MIG and the TIG et cetera. The cheapest most basic kind is called flux core. It’s basically a spool of wire that the machine melts into a puddle of joining through a thin nozzle, sort of an overblown soldering.

Harbor Freight carries decent flux-core welders for between one and two hundred dollars. I was all but settled on going that route, when I realized that a new wave of cheap Chinese alternatives was on the way. For the same pricing, there now exists something called a YesWelder (among other brand names). It’s essentially the same as the Harbor Freight models, but with the big difference that it will also let you perform the very basics of stick welding (and even, with some modding, TIG).

Not much information yet about the YesWelder FLUX-135, except the confirmation that the “new updated version 2 from 2021.11.15, capable of Gasless MIG, Stick, Lift TIG with additional WP-17V-10 torch”. So just maybe for once I’m in on the ground floor of something? Maybe.

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Optional from Russell Brand
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