Recently became aware of these Knipex mini bolt cutters. Man, they make cutting 1/8" steel and stainless filler rod so much easier. No more Welpers for me. They'll be on the MIG cart where they are best suited. At fifty bucks, I think they're a bargain, considering they're a high quality German made tool, not some Chinesium POS.

Edited to correct the price. I paid around $50 not $30. They'll outlast me, so I think its still a good value.

Tagging Matt Hayden as we'd communicated earlier on dual shield questions. Wasn't happy with the performance of the Lincoln 71M dual shield wire I tried. No matter what I did, there was random worm tracks, lousy root fusion in 1F, and man it was smoky. Decided to try another flavor and wow what a difference. This is Eutectic DO266S set at 25V/250 IPM 40 CFH 75/25 gas. The first thing I noticed was a fraction of the smoke, and no worm tracks. Wet in really nice. And even in 1F there's root fusion. Very promising. Still need to get used to it. Definitely need to slow down for more fill, and shift my aim up a little, as I'm favoring too low in the fillet. This may end up my go to dual shield. It's a little spendy at about $8.79/pound, but it works.

Happy New Year! Hope you all have a great 2025. Last night Mother Nature put on a great light show for us here in Alaska. Better than fireworks!

Hope everyone is enjoying the holiday. We plan to keep hitting it hard in 2025 with lots of new stuff. Anyone have any welding related new year's resolutions they'd like to share? 

I wanted to practice on some .063 x 3" aluminum tube, so rather than cutting short pieces I decided to make pie cuts. After making 2 90's I went a step further and made a ram's head. Then a couple of saddle cuts into a cross, on to 3 more 90's of different radii. Then what the heck, put them all together. Man, did I learn a lot, like how to fill holes and the criticality of torch angle, and so much more.