I sometimes think that half of the fun of working on cars is buying the tools. I can spend hours looking through equipment catalogs – paper or online. Several times I have come close to buying a chain saw even though I haven’t got a garden.  Now I really needed a welder and I was going to enjoy choosing one.

My first idea was to get a spot welder. I imagined clamping my new body panels in position and just running round the joins putting in a spot weld every couple of centimeters. No smoke, no mask required, no consumables. It would be perfect and I would probably be finished in a couple of weeks.

First stop www.ebay.co.uk. For some reason there were many more second hand spot-welders on eBay’s UK site than their German one (I live in Germany). As luck would have it I just about to drive back to the UK for a short holiday so I bid on a couple of machines and bought this fine specimin for just under 100 pounds.

Whilst I was in England I called in at the Twickenham branch of  Machine Mart and got an  air operated ‘joggler’ for putting flanges along the edge of the repair panels. As soon as I got the machine back home to my garage, I found that it was fantastic for joining test pieces of steel together. The welds were neat and strong and looked just like the ones made in the factory. Unfortunately joining real parts together was much more of a challenge. Most panels are either to large, too curved or just too inacessible to get into the jaws of the spot welder so I decided that I needed a different type of welding machine.

About twenty years ago I rented a small MIG welder to patch some holes in my rusty Peugeot 304S Cabriolet. It was not a great success and the main thing I remember was having to replace the tiny disposable argon gas bottles very frequently.

Doing my research on the internet I discovered that MIG technology had moved on. No-gas welders were no available with flux coated wire that made gas bottles redundant! Reading further it seemed that the no-gas system was not perfect. Chief disadvantage apeeared to be smokier arc which obscured the weld pool, and a rather messy welding bead. I knew that my welding was never going to be neat but played safe by buying a machine that could be used with or without gas.

As I was still in England I popped back to Machine Mart and picked up a Clark 90EN. It cost me about About 150 pounds if I remember rightly.

So, now I had two welders. I couldn’t wait to get home and learn how to use them.