A little while ago, I had a question about life-span of fluxcore wire,
and mentioned that I had a MIG welder I'd gotten as a Christmas
present that I was planning to write a review of at some point. Well,
here it is -- I'll mention going in that I've got no association with
Clarke nor the company I got it from other than having bought this
welder.

Before I begin: when I was researching MIG welders, somebody (I think
on this newsgroup) mentioned that the most important feature of a 120V
MIG was that it weigh enough and have a solid enough handle that it
could be used as a good boat anchor. If that's your view of 120V
welders you can stop reading right here, since this is a 120V welder.
It is a light-duty unit; if your interest is in structural welding of
1/2" thick metal you can forget about it. Like any tool, there are
things this welder is designed for and things it isn't, and major jobs
like that are 'way outside its range.

I picked it based on the following criteria: I don't have useful 220
in my garage (I do have 220, but it's only 20 amps. What on earth
were the first owners of this house thinking?). Among 120V welders,
this one had the best advertised duty cycle -- better than Lincoln or
Miller at a much better price. I expect parts to be easy to come by
-- Sears is now selling it as a Craftsman, and while I'm no fan of
Sears, I have to admit that they're good about maintaining parts
stocks for old products. Finally, my needs are definitely on the
light-duty end -- the project that finally got me off my butt to learn
how to do this, and to get a welder, is repairing the clutch pedal
mounting bracket on my daughter's Damned Toyota truck.

So, on to the welder.

I guess the best place to start is with the crap... excuse me,
accessories... packaged with it. It comes with 1/2 lb of .035
fluxcore wire, three contact tips (.023, .030 iirc, and .035), a MIG
nozzle, a plastic-handled wire brush, and a pathetic hand-held face
shield. The wire is, of course, very useful as a starter. I'm not
quite sure why there was any point in including two contact tips that
didn't fit the wire supplied; I very much would have preferred a .035
to match the wire, and one or two spares the same size. Since it came
with fluxcore, I'd rather have gotten a fluxcore "nozzle" (I've since
bought one) than a MIG nozzle. The brush is OK (though it doesn't
have a lot of wire brush area -- a $1.95 wood-handled wire brush works
a lot better), and the face shield is worse than a waste of time,
since it requires a hand to hold it; I smell liability lawyers here.

The welder itself has some interesting points. The controls are
pretty standard -- a 4-position voltage control and an
infinitely-adjustable wirespeed control. They work fine, but I'd
really rather have calibrated controls. I would rather know what
voltage a given setting provides, and what wirespeed a given speed
provides. But, really, while it would satisfy my particular flavor
of geekines, it wouldn't actually provide any more useful
information.

I think, based on the manual which is the same for both this welder
and their 180EN, that the two welders share the same cabinet. At any
rate, there are holes in the cabinet that would be perfect for
inserting an axle to put it on two wheels in back (I'm sort of tempted
to do that...), while the hardware I got with it was just feet front
and back. Something very odd is that the back of the cabinet seems to
be designed to put a 4" gas bottle on it -- there's a half-round
depression at the top, and a platform on the bottom, which look like
they had this in mind, but there's no way to secure a bottle to the
case. If I do step up to MIG at some point, I'll investigate putting
on some sort of strap to hold a bottle on. The welder does have a gas
valve and hose for MIG; I went ahead and also got a regulator at the
same time I got the welder so the gas bottle and some wire would be
all I needed to move on. The cabinet also has room for a 10lb spool
of wire inside (which is what I've got in there now).

It seems to be built ruggedly enough -- really solid, in fact. The
wire feed is plastic, except the surfaces that are actually in contact
with the wire are metal. The tension controls are sort of obvious in
terms of a what to screw down to increase tension on the wire feed and
on the spool; I'm sure no expert on getting them set up right, but the
wire doesn't seem to be coming out distorted and I have yet to have a
birds-nest (frantically knocking wood here).

My experience with it to date has been that as long as I work within
the limitations of the welder and my power in the garage, it works
fine. It'll weld light sheet metal all day; near as I can tell (with
my really limited skill) its settings are quite consistent. I haven't
had any sense that the wire speed varies a lot for a given setting
(which is a complaint I've seen about low-end welders). Welding metal
thinner than 1/8" seems to work just fine. On thicker metal (it's
supposed to be good for 5/16", but that seems like somebody's fantasy)
I have a hard time getting adequate penetration, but I'm not sure to
what extent that's the welder's problem and to what extent it's mine.
Working on the 15A 120V circuit I have available, I've never tripped
the welder's thermal shutoff -- I've tripped the circuit breaker
instead (grumble grumble grumble).

It'll be a decade before I can answer the next question: how does it
hold up? My guess is it'll be OK. We'll see.

So: If you're looking for a light-duty welder for reasonably thin
metal, this one seems really good for its price. If you're going to
be doing heavy-duty structural welding, that's just not what it's
intended for and you'll be miserable.