50 Year Old vs Modern Welder Tested

**Comparing Old and New Welding Machines: A Hands-On Experiment**

In this experiment, we'll be comparing the performance of an old welding machine with a new one. The goal is to see if the newer technology has improved the welding process, making it easier and more efficient.

As we began setting up the machines, Nolan expressed his excitement about trying out the new welder, saying "Oh my god, it's so light! So easy!" This enthusiasm was palpable as he started using the new machine, commenting on its improved ergonomics and overall welding experience. The sound of the welding process was also a notable difference, with the new machine producing a "really consistent crispy" weld.

The first test involved creating two identical welds using both machines. The results were surprisingly similar, with the old machine producing a weld that looked "pretty good and pretty similar" to the one made by the new machine. This was despite the significant difference in power sources, with the old machine running on a massive generator and the new one using a wall outlet.

To further test the strength of the welds, we used a press to apply pressure to the welds, trying to break them apart. The results were impressive, with both machines producing strong welds that could withstand significant force before breaking. In fact, the old machine's weld was able to bend and flex under pressure, but ultimately didn't break, while the new machine's weld held up even better.

This experiment demonstrates the improvements in welding technology over the past 50 years. The newer machine is not only easier to use but also produces a stronger and more consistent weld. Despite the old machine's respectable performance, the results are clear: the new machine is superior.

As we conclude this experiment, Nolan expresses his enthusiasm for trying out more welding projects, saying "Let's do it! Follow me and Nolen J Sykes if you'd like and remember to subscribe to Donut if you haven't already. Now go make something."

This hands-on experiment showcases the advancements in welding technology and highlights the importance of using the right tools for the job. Whether you're a seasoned welder or just starting out, this experience is sure to inspire you to try new things and push the boundaries of what's possible with metalworking.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwe're testing welders today we've got a brand new multi-process welder and a humongous 50 year old mig welder does the new stuff really do a better job than the old stuff how much has technology changed in the last half century we're gonna be comparing these welders and some welding paraphernalia to see if this welder belongs in your garage or museum let's get miggy with it it's a big glob oh well jesus thank you to raycon for sponsoring today's video uh can you move to your left a little bit ah perfect sometimes i need to take my foot off the gas pedal and just slam down on the old artistic pedal so i use raycon's everyday earbuds to protect my artistic merit from the sounds of the world their optimized gel tips and in-ear fit allow me to break off from the stress of the garage and become absorbed in my work and it's easy to navigate between sound modes i can block all the outside noise with raycon's noise isolation feature or i can set it on awareness mode and still hear the world around me plus they stay in your ear and with over fifty thousand five star reviews you know you're getting quality audio at half the price of those other top brands if you want to buy your own pair sprint over to buyracon.com donut to get 15 off your raycon purchase or just click the link in the description below now if you don't know there's more than one way to weld stuff but today we're going to be focusing on mig welding which stands for metal inert gas and it's probably the most common form of welding and here's how it works in basic terms you've got electricity coming through a weld wire that creates an arc which melts the metal creating a weld pool that wire is being fed through your gun here and it's also surrounded by an inner gas that protects the weld from oxidizing from the surrounding air so that's how you get a nice clean weld keeps spatter down and makes them look real nice mig welding is one of the most common forms of welding that you'll see in a garage because it's relatively cheap and it works great for automotive applications can't really go wrong with a mig welder you can do just about anything you guys welded the roll cage on the money pit e36 we did the bumpers on the low truck welders have gotten really good and this one is no exception which is kind of how you justify the 4 000 cost it makes it a lot easier to get good at something when you've got a good tool to do it with and this welder is an awesome tool all right now that we've introduced our new welder nolan i'd like to see you lay down some beads brother all right we're going to lay some beads on this sheet metal right here yes sir i'm going to clean it off first with this grinder we've got our safety gear on yup so let's get to it i can't hear you joe oh don't worry one of the most important steps to getting a good weld is making sure the material you're working on is good and clean this has some surface rust on it so no one's gonna clean up with the grinder real quick beautiful all right now that our work piece is cleaned up and basically ready to well it's time to set the welder up so like i said before this welder does a lot of automatic settings for us so you only got to know a couple things basically the process that you're using in this case we're mig welding so you see it says mig we're welding steel and c25 is just uh about the gas that we're using the inert gas lives here in this tank and then it automatically sets our voltage and our wire speed now you do have manual control over them if you want it but this is always going to be a good starting point especially if you're not sure how to dial in a welder this thing can get you going pretty easily to actually create the arc needed to weld metal you need to create a closed electrical circuit you do that by running an electrical current between a grounded piece of metal and your welding torch that electricity will then arc across the small gap between your torch and the metal in an attempt to keep the circuit closed and that arc generates a ton of heat up to 6 500 degrees fahrenheit which is how you can melt metal it's looking good and you can see you know it flows into the metal nicely it doesn't look like it's separated or sitting on top of the metal so it looks like it's you know taking a nice bite into the metal all right nolan well it didn't take too long and you're laying down some pretty nice looking welds thanks and i think you'd probably agree it was sort of easy yeah easy to set the welder up easy to get to welding and then you know the welder does a good job right i'm very interested to see if it'll be as easy to use this monstrosity that we bought on ebay for eleven hundred dollars unlike our new multi-process welder this box here is really just a giant transformer it supplies the electricity needed to weld to this smaller box which then transfers the power and gas to our welding torch through these really long cables and also unlike our new welder our weld wire is actually contained inside the gun which is why it's so giant heavy and cumbersome back in the day mig welding was done like this this is a spool gun so the wire is actually in the gun it lets you have super long cables especially nice if you have a gigantic welder that you don't want to move around the shop all the time but this does make the gun a fair bit clunkier yeah this thing looks like a mix between a star wars blaster and a super eight cannon pretty heavy compared to the modern torch while it doesn't have auto set features like the other one the fact is there's not that many settings to tweak with there's really two basically you've got this big knob here and that controls our voltage or you know the heat that's being plowed into the weld and then on the gun itself we've got wire speed setting so just because it isn't super convenient doesn't mean that it's not a good tool and then it can't get the job done so the question is could that old welder do as good of a job as a new welder this thing only runs on 240 volt electricity which we don't have built into the garage here so we had to get a generator and we're going to power this thing off of that generator we're going to fire this thing up see what happens okay here goes nothing let's uh let's get her going oh that's that is heavy holy mackerel that's splattery yeah you can tell there's so much batter and you can even see it just looks like you're a piling wire on top of the metal all right flash she might be tangled in there or melted to the front and that's where the problem started try as we might tweaking the settings we couldn't get a good weld nothing seemed to help the spatter is insane i mean just the amount of like hot metal balls flying off of that comparatively is crazy i'm gonna go from 38 to 40 here there we go that still looks like crap getting closer but yeah i mean that that's rough and we've tested all the settings we've tweaked everything and this is as good as we can get it which makes me think something's wrong but i think we've got an issue with our setup and i think we need to do a little investigating now we're gonna dive deeper into our old welder in a second but first let's talk safety masks and gloves are essential if you want to start welding and they've come a long way since the 70s the reason for wearing a mask while welding is pretty obvious the arc from your torch is technically brighter than the sun so you gotta protect your eyes but masks of the 70s were pretty rudimentary compared to today's technology i mean this is like looking through a trash bag i couldn't tell at all what you're doing so i'm impressed that uh you can even do that how much harder is it to see so much like blurry it's too dark kind of i mean you can't even see out of the lens unless you flip it up and once you know it the clear lens is very dirty do you feel safer when you crouch i can't fall as far you know what i mean today's mask they auto darken for you you don't have to flip down this little visor here look at the size of the element too you get a lot more viewing area right you can see the light sensors there there and there those are waiting to see bright light and as soon as it's triggered it darkens the lens here what you're looking through so it can work for doing plasma cutting or grinding or welding great bit of kit way better than these changes the game if you're still weld and using an old helmet treat yourself primary okay after spending some time with our old welder we finally figured out why we were having so many dang problems with it the three phase is basically um electricity that has three alternating phases right our generator is a single phase 240 output so we were having those problems with the arc not being consistent and solid that's because it's only getting one of three phases that it needs we're just underpowering this thing like crazy and i think once we get the proper generator then it should weld a lot better so we upgraded our tiny single phase generator with this huge 300 amp diesel-powered generator capable of three-phase power unlike single-phase which operates with only one wave of alternating current three-phase power operates on three waves each sending power slightly out of phase with one another filling out the power delivery now most things that require three-phase power are gonna use about a hundred amps but our 50-year-old welder only requires 30. so we thought that was a little bit weird but still we hoped that our new big generator would solve the problem unfortunately after hooking everything up plugging in our welder it doesn't even work at all now it works worse than it did before oh wow jesus so we're going to take our welder uh to the guys who own this generator we're going to take it to their shop and see if we can get things working there so we sent our generator off to the pros and after a little bit of tweaking and a little bit of a struggle to get here yep but if the welds are good it'll all be worth it is it on no oh yeah definitely much better a lot smoother looking you've still got some spatter but that looks way better these welds are looking pretty good especially compared to what we're trying to oh my gosh so much better it does weld pretty well it obviously took us a lot longer to dial in those settings than it does on the new welder i'm ready to say this welder does a good job of welding even if it is less convenient but now i kind of want to see you know if we weld two pieces of metal together with both welders which one will break easier with both welders up and running it's finally time to see if this 50 year old welder can keep up with our new one we're going to weld two pieces of metal together and then we're going to put them in our hydraulic press and try to break them best weld winds well we're only going to do one side because if we welded both sides of this it'd be way too strong we kind of actually do want to break the well we want to do our best but we want to be able to break it open and look at the differences between the two welds no one's going to just run a bead across these we'll take them to the press see what happens we had the heat turned up pretty high so it did kind of make a cavity right there as you can see appearance wise it looks pretty good if you look at it from the side you can see that the puddle does make it about halfway down into the material now let's go do the same thing with the new welder and see how that looks how's that feel oh my god it's so light so easy this is where it's at that sounded nice oh it felt good it looks much prettier look at the lack of spattering i know it was just a better welding experience overall sounded great it sounded like a really consistent crispy well okay so here's with the old one here's with the new one and just visually new welder far superior i don't know i'm looking forward to seeing how it stacked up it looks pretty good and pretty similar and you got to consider the the crazy difference here this is done with a massive generator pumping three-phase power and this is done with our wall outlet yeah that's pretty wild interested to see how these fair in the press yeah we got our straps set up on the press here we've got a piece of corner stock pressing on the weld the weld is facing downwards so we're gonna try to pull the weld apart like so we got a pressure gauge on the press as well to monitor the pressure and see how much it takes before it snaps yeah and there's also the chance that it doesn't snap and that these welds are strong enough that they just bend and we can't really break them which in that case i mean that's really good news all right so this is the old weld let's see how well it does starting to see a little bending at the weld definitely bending and we're not really registering on the gauge oh starting to creep up yeah getting close to a ton of force that's a ton yep oh man each hash mark is a ton so that's one ton and we're bending but it hasn't broken which is good that wasn't that wasn't a piece yeah i just slipped the mountain out this metal is going to bend before that breaks yeah and that's what you want yeah that's the sign of a good weld right the model around it bends rather than the joint braking that's great i'm a little surprised but i guess i shouldn't be because again the penetration was so good and we really put a lot of heat in that sucker so i would say that's a pass right there the weld didn't break it just bent so great job nolan great job old welder now let's move on to the new one okay here's the new weld let's see how it does if it breaks it's gonna be very embarrassing all right already bending holding at about half a ton not seeing any increase in the pressure it's just bending the metal tells me that the weld is super strong and that the metal is gonna give before the weld does boy howdy look at that that's two solid welds what do you think has welding technology come a long way absolutely it's crazy don't think there's any surprise there yeah the form factor is a lot easier it's just more ergonomic to use oh oh my god it's so light the improvements are humongous so not exactly surprising that the technology has come a long way in 50 years what is surprising is how well the old machine held up yeah you know we did great we managed to turn out two pretty similar results from two very dissimilar tools oh it's a little bit worse in every way but it still welds pretty good yeah that being said i want to go weld some more stuff let's do it follow job at zach joe follow me and nolan j sykes if you'd like and remember to subscribe to donut if you haven't already now go make something let's find out don't talk about my facial hair shut up i like it thank you that's the only thing you're allowed to say about itwe're testing welders today we've got a brand new multi-process welder and a humongous 50 year old mig welder does the new stuff really do a better job than the old stuff how much has technology changed in the last half century we're gonna be comparing these welders and some welding paraphernalia to see if this welder belongs in your garage or museum let's get miggy with it it's a big glob oh well jesus thank you to raycon for sponsoring today's video uh can you move to your left a little bit ah perfect sometimes i need to take my foot off the gas pedal and just slam down on the old artistic pedal so i use raycon's everyday earbuds to protect my artistic merit from the sounds of the world their optimized gel tips and in-ear fit allow me to break off from the stress of the garage and become absorbed in my work and it's easy to navigate between sound modes i can block all the outside noise with raycon's noise isolation feature or i can set it on awareness mode and still hear the world around me plus they stay in your ear and with over fifty thousand five star reviews you know you're getting quality audio at half the price of those other top brands if you want to buy your own pair sprint over to buyracon.com donut to get 15 off your raycon purchase or just click the link in the description below now if you don't know there's more than one way to weld stuff but today we're going to be focusing on mig welding which stands for metal inert gas and it's probably the most common form of welding and here's how it works in basic terms you've got electricity coming through a weld wire that creates an arc which melts the metal creating a weld pool that wire is being fed through your gun here and it's also surrounded by an inner gas that protects the weld from oxidizing from the surrounding air so that's how you get a nice clean weld keeps spatter down and makes them look real nice mig welding is one of the most common forms of welding that you'll see in a garage because it's relatively cheap and it works great for automotive applications can't really go wrong with a mig welder you can do just about anything you guys welded the roll cage on the money pit e36 we did the bumpers on the low truck welders have gotten really good and this one is no exception which is kind of how you justify the 4 000 cost it makes it a lot easier to get good at something when you've got a good tool to do it with and this welder is an awesome tool all right now that we've introduced our new welder nolan i'd like to see you lay down some beads brother all right we're going to lay some beads on this sheet metal right here yes sir i'm going to clean it off first with this grinder we've got our safety gear on yup so let's get to it i can't hear you joe oh don't worry one of the most important steps to getting a good weld is making sure the material you're working on is good and clean this has some surface rust on it so no one's gonna clean up with the grinder real quick beautiful all right now that our work piece is cleaned up and basically ready to well it's time to set the welder up so like i said before this welder does a lot of automatic settings for us so you only got to know a couple things basically the process that you're using in this case we're mig welding so you see it says mig we're welding steel and c25 is just uh about the gas that we're using the inert gas lives here in this tank and then it automatically sets our voltage and our wire speed now you do have manual control over them if you want it but this is always going to be a good starting point especially if you're not sure how to dial in a welder this thing can get you going pretty easily to actually create the arc needed to weld metal you need to create a closed electrical circuit you do that by running an electrical current between a grounded piece of metal and your welding torch that electricity will then arc across the small gap between your torch and the metal in an attempt to keep the circuit closed and that arc generates a ton of heat up to 6 500 degrees fahrenheit which is how you can melt metal it's looking good and you can see you know it flows into the metal nicely it doesn't look like it's separated or sitting on top of the metal so it looks like it's you know taking a nice bite into the metal all right nolan well it didn't take too long and you're laying down some pretty nice looking welds thanks and i think you'd probably agree it was sort of easy yeah easy to set the welder up easy to get to welding and then you know the welder does a good job right i'm very interested to see if it'll be as easy to use this monstrosity that we bought on ebay for eleven hundred dollars unlike our new multi-process welder this box here is really just a giant transformer it supplies the electricity needed to weld to this smaller box which then transfers the power and gas to our welding torch through these really long cables and also unlike our new welder our weld wire is actually contained inside the gun which is why it's so giant heavy and cumbersome back in the day mig welding was done like this this is a spool gun so the wire is actually in the gun it lets you have super long cables especially nice if you have a gigantic welder that you don't want to move around the shop all the time but this does make the gun a fair bit clunkier yeah this thing looks like a mix between a star wars blaster and a super eight cannon pretty heavy compared to the modern torch while it doesn't have auto set features like the other one the fact is there's not that many settings to tweak with there's really two basically you've got this big knob here and that controls our voltage or you know the heat that's being plowed into the weld and then on the gun itself we've got wire speed setting so just because it isn't super convenient doesn't mean that it's not a good tool and then it can't get the job done so the question is could that old welder do as good of a job as a new welder this thing only runs on 240 volt electricity which we don't have built into the garage here so we had to get a generator and we're going to power this thing off of that generator we're going to fire this thing up see what happens okay here goes nothing let's uh let's get her going oh that's that is heavy holy mackerel that's splattery yeah you can tell there's so much batter and you can even see it just looks like you're a piling wire on top of the metal all right flash she might be tangled in there or melted to the front and that's where the problem started try as we might tweaking the settings we couldn't get a good weld nothing seemed to help the spatter is insane i mean just the amount of like hot metal balls flying off of that comparatively is crazy i'm gonna go from 38 to 40 here there we go that still looks like crap getting closer but yeah i mean that that's rough and we've tested all the settings we've tweaked everything and this is as good as we can get it which makes me think something's wrong but i think we've got an issue with our setup and i think we need to do a little investigating now we're gonna dive deeper into our old welder in a second but first let's talk safety masks and gloves are essential if you want to start welding and they've come a long way since the 70s the reason for wearing a mask while welding is pretty obvious the arc from your torch is technically brighter than the sun so you gotta protect your eyes but masks of the 70s were pretty rudimentary compared to today's technology i mean this is like looking through a trash bag i couldn't tell at all what you're doing so i'm impressed that uh you can even do that how much harder is it to see so much like blurry it's too dark kind of i mean you can't even see out of the lens unless you flip it up and once you know it the clear lens is very dirty do you feel safer when you crouch i can't fall as far you know what i mean today's mask they auto darken for you you don't have to flip down this little visor here look at the size of the element too you get a lot more viewing area right you can see the light sensors there there and there those are waiting to see bright light and as soon as it's triggered it darkens the lens here what you're looking through so it can work for doing plasma cutting or grinding or welding great bit of kit way better than these changes the game if you're still weld and using an old helmet treat yourself primary okay after spending some time with our old welder we finally figured out why we were having so many dang problems with it the three phase is basically um electricity that has three alternating phases right our generator is a single phase 240 output so we were having those problems with the arc not being consistent and solid that's because it's only getting one of three phases that it needs we're just underpowering this thing like crazy and i think once we get the proper generator then it should weld a lot better so we upgraded our tiny single phase generator with this huge 300 amp diesel-powered generator capable of three-phase power unlike single-phase which operates with only one wave of alternating current three-phase power operates on three waves each sending power slightly out of phase with one another filling out the power delivery now most things that require three-phase power are gonna use about a hundred amps but our 50-year-old welder only requires 30. so we thought that was a little bit weird but still we hoped that our new big generator would solve the problem unfortunately after hooking everything up plugging in our welder it doesn't even work at all now it works worse than it did before oh wow jesus so we're going to take our welder uh to the guys who own this generator we're going to take it to their shop and see if we can get things working there so we sent our generator off to the pros and after a little bit of tweaking and a little bit of a struggle to get here yep but if the welds are good it'll all be worth it is it on no oh yeah definitely much better a lot smoother looking you've still got some spatter but that looks way better these welds are looking pretty good especially compared to what we're trying to oh my gosh so much better it does weld pretty well it obviously took us a lot longer to dial in those settings than it does on the new welder i'm ready to say this welder does a good job of welding even if it is less convenient but now i kind of want to see you know if we weld two pieces of metal together with both welders which one will break easier with both welders up and running it's finally time to see if this 50 year old welder can keep up with our new one we're going to weld two pieces of metal together and then we're going to put them in our hydraulic press and try to break them best weld winds well we're only going to do one side because if we welded both sides of this it'd be way too strong we kind of actually do want to break the well we want to do our best but we want to be able to break it open and look at the differences between the two welds no one's going to just run a bead across these we'll take them to the press see what happens we had the heat turned up pretty high so it did kind of make a cavity right there as you can see appearance wise it looks pretty good if you look at it from the side you can see that the puddle does make it about halfway down into the material now let's go do the same thing with the new welder and see how that looks how's that feel oh my god it's so light so easy this is where it's at that sounded nice oh it felt good it looks much prettier look at the lack of spattering i know it was just a better welding experience overall sounded great it sounded like a really consistent crispy well okay so here's with the old one here's with the new one and just visually new welder far superior i don't know i'm looking forward to seeing how it stacked up it looks pretty good and pretty similar and you got to consider the the crazy difference here this is done with a massive generator pumping three-phase power and this is done with our wall outlet yeah that's pretty wild interested to see how these fair in the press yeah we got our straps set up on the press here we've got a piece of corner stock pressing on the weld the weld is facing downwards so we're gonna try to pull the weld apart like so we got a pressure gauge on the press as well to monitor the pressure and see how much it takes before it snaps yeah and there's also the chance that it doesn't snap and that these welds are strong enough that they just bend and we can't really break them which in that case i mean that's really good news all right so this is the old weld let's see how well it does starting to see a little bending at the weld definitely bending and we're not really registering on the gauge oh starting to creep up yeah getting close to a ton of force that's a ton yep oh man each hash mark is a ton so that's one ton and we're bending but it hasn't broken which is good that wasn't that wasn't a piece yeah i just slipped the mountain out this metal is going to bend before that breaks yeah and that's what you want yeah that's the sign of a good weld right the model around it bends rather than the joint braking that's great i'm a little surprised but i guess i shouldn't be because again the penetration was so good and we really put a lot of heat in that sucker so i would say that's a pass right there the weld didn't break it just bent so great job nolan great job old welder now let's move on to the new one okay here's the new weld let's see how it does if it breaks it's gonna be very embarrassing all right already bending holding at about half a ton not seeing any increase in the pressure it's just bending the metal tells me that the weld is super strong and that the metal is gonna give before the weld does boy howdy look at that that's two solid welds what do you think has welding technology come a long way absolutely it's crazy don't think there's any surprise there yeah the form factor is a lot easier it's just more ergonomic to use oh oh my god it's so light the improvements are humongous so not exactly surprising that the technology has come a long way in 50 years what is surprising is how well the old machine held up yeah you know we did great we managed to turn out two pretty similar results from two very dissimilar tools oh it's a little bit worse in every way but it still welds pretty good yeah that being said i want to go weld some more stuff let's do it follow job at zach joe follow me and nolan j sykes if you'd like and remember to subscribe to donut if you haven't already now go make something let's find out don't talk about my facial hair shut up i like it thank you that's the only thing you're allowed to say about it