Hey,
Im new here so I used the search feature so I wouldnt get flamed for reposting old topics, but I didnt find anything about the Chichago electric.

Has anyone bought or used the Chicago Electric plasma cutter sold by harbor freight? If you get it online its only $500 at the moment.

All I really need it for is sheetmetal, 26-18 gauge stainless, and occasionally some stainless or aluminum plate.

Does anyone know how the quality would compare with one of those ebay Smiley plasma/arc/tigs?

If I could get the smiley combo for the 600 and it is about the same quality or better then I would probably go with that so I could tig some stuff too. I just hate getting stuff and finding out that it has a 15 minute life span.

With the smiley tig what is about the thinnest stainless you can tig with it?

Thanks,
Eric

 

from looking at it in the store the other day and all the pics on the net i'm pretty sure its the same 40 amp cutter you can buy off ebay for half the price hf sells it for.

and people have had good luck w/ the smiley tools/mitec/riland units; i'd buy one of those before paying extra for a hf rebranded chinese knockoff.

 

One thing to keep in mind is the availability of consumables for plasma cutters, most use different consumables specific to each machine, and you need to make sure you can get the parts you need because you do need to replace them after so many cuts or the cut quality will go to hell and then eventually stop cutting. What always makes me leary of hf welding/plasma stuff is how easy is it to get consumables, particularly plasma, since the plasma cutter industry isn't really standardized at all as far as consumables go. Buying something like a hypertherm or thermal arc or any of the rebadged ones of those (miller/lincoln/hobart) means you can probably go to any welding supplier (online or retail) and get consumables and parts when you need. I have no idea how easy it would be to get consumables for the chinese harbor freight machines. HF says they will sell them separately, but I've never had any real luck getting individual parts from HF (only tried twice tho). Just my .02

 

I talked to a friend of mine who apparantly bought one of the smiley tools ones off ebay about 4 months ago, he said the plasma cutter works really well and he can even tig stuff down to 26 guage stainless, and thinner with smaller tungsten.

I went ahead and bid on it and I won the auction. Hopefully I will have it by the end of the week. I got a pack of 5 of all the replaceable plasma parts for $20, so I should be good for quite a while.

I should be able to make enough money with it to buy a Lincoln precision tig 185, and maybe a new bigger air compressor.

I will post some pics of the weld quality on stainless when I get it.
Eric

 

I emailed the guy selling the Smiley units, and its only a DC machine, its not AC so you can't weld alum. This is the only reason I didn't buy it.

 

I got it the other day, there are some kinks to work out with the plasma cutting. I am going to have to play around with the air pressure and amperage a lot. Right now its not wanting to cut much more than 3/32" and there is a ton of slag and oxide formation, much worse than if I used an oxy torch and tried to melt the crap out of it.

The tig part seems to work well. I was able to fusion weld some 24 gauge stainless and just push the puddle along perfectly, though the pieces can not have any gap at all between them. 1/16" filler rod at that thickness is kind of useless. I was using 1/16" tungsten at 10 amps, which is a little too low but it still works nicely.

Im disapointed with the plasma part, which is the reason why I got it in the first place. It doesnt have a pilot arc so you cant cut grate or anything of that nature with it. Hopefully I can get it working right, otherwise its going to be useless as a plasma cutter, unless I just need to cut scrap metal.

The tig does what I need it to do so nicely that it almost makes up for the plasma. It also has high frequency starting which is great because I thought it was a scratch start.

Is there some way to post pictures on here or do I have to upload them to my website and then do the IMG SRC html stuff? I got plenty of bandwidth just a pain in the ***. I took a bunch of pics of the machine the cables and the parts and some picture of the welds.

Eric

 

Harbor Freight's premier brand, Chicago Electric, is very cheap. do not rely on these cheap motors. they may work at first, but will degrade over time and die a lot sooner than trusted brands.
same goes for anything that uses batteries.

Harbor Freight and Chicago Electric are only good for cheap, small load, non-critical items. i.e. cheap handtools that won't see much torque. the precision, quality, metallurgy, seals (ie hydraulics), basically everything is cheap. anything that uses a motor/engine/battery stay away from.