Sharp

I bought a Clarke 151en about 6 months ago which does gasless and gas. I'd only played around with stick welding before when I was a kid so it was my first time mig welding. It came set up for gasless with flux core wire and I used that for a bit but ended up splashing out and getting a regulator and using hobby weld 5 and it totally transformed my welding. If you're a good welder then you can probably get good results with gasless, certainly good enough for chasis welding but if you're not very good (like me) and you want to improve then I think gas is the way to go. There's an article on migwelding where he plays around with gasless which is worth a read. The biggest difference for me is you can see what you're doing a lot better with gas as there's no smoke and splatter to obscure your vision which makes it a lot easier to see where you're going wrong. Having a torch attached to the welder is a great idea, I'll definitely be trying that! I doubt there's much difference between the cheaper hobby welders, the clarke I have does 30-150amps and having both 0.6 and 0.8 wire I can get decent beads on 1mm - 3mm no problem, it'll do thicker than that as well if you need.

Just as an update in case anyone else is interested. I ordered some bushes to fit the 300tdi defender and these fit slightly better than the ones pictured above, they are still connical in shape but stiffer and slightly smaller, the ones I took off look like they were from the earlier 200tdi shocks and are symettrical. I've attached a couple of pictures. I got the shock absorbers from paddocks and must have got the wrong ones. 300tdi . 200tdi Just going to leave them on for now as they seem to be working ok and I'll take more care with the chassis numbers next time!

Cheers for the responses, looks like I've ordered the post-TD5 type shocks...doh. Oh well, always learning. I've ordered up some of the old style ones from paddocks so hopefully they'll fit on ok, glad I kept the old metal washers. This is the washer that they came with Thanks a lot for your help Ben

I've just fitted some cheap britpart rear shock absorbers and they only came with two lower washers, I reused the old flat washers in the middle but now I'm wondering if the bushes that came with them are meant to be used without a centre washer. Hopefully the images make sense. Ben P.s. I got britpart against the better advice because they were £13 and I just needed them to get through my mot, if they last a year that'll be enough because I'll be doing some more work on the suspension then.