The Clarke 151TE is a well respected MIG for hobby use. Buy your own gas cylinder from somewhere like Adams gases (those disposable things cost a fortune for 10mins of gas(dispite their claims of 20mins)) and you'll be able to get a regulator for the cylinder for around £30 on Ebay.

You might even have enough left of your budget to buy a decent pair of welding gaunlets and an auto dimming welding mask.

I don't weld cars much thesedays but, when I was younger I used to make a bit of beer money from doing little welding jobs for people whose cars had failed MOT's.

Edited by Wackyracer on 03/03/2016 at 09:45

DONT!

Over the years I've bought and used and to be frank wore out quite a few welders from SnapOn to Cerboa.

All good and did the job.

many buttons and controls for welding from thin to thick steel.

And what I found out was I was paying for way too many features.

Almost all of my welding on cars used the lower power settings.

Lower amperage.

I've paid out for Migs that could weld something like 1/2 inch and never used that function.

A £500 mig looks impressive but the higher amperage functions are a waste of cash unless you making skips or tanks.

These days I settle for something lighter,

more portable,

And for cars not the gassless type as they just dont seem to like welding where there is any rust no matter how much you clean it first.

Pretty much all my welding is done on a little Machine mart welder that is sub £150 and I can move the thing around!

I'd give more consideration to the sige of the wire spool any welder can take.

Small spools can work out expensive,

middle sized are more common,

the big ones are cheaper if you welding everyday.

But if all your planning for is some Mot standard patching or a new sill or so you are going to want something that you can move to the work then get it out the way when done.

As you don't state just what your hobbie is,

unless it IS restoring tanks/skips buy a reasonable quality smaller welder that you can pick up and put in a boot.

It broke my heart when my £500 SnapOn welder was scrapped due to high repair costs.

but it was replaced with a £250 welder that was so good I could mig my name on rusty steel without blowing through!!

Any way this is just the opinion of one guy who bought a lot of welders that had a lot of buttons that NEVER got used.

But I still had to pay for them.

And drag the big heavy sods around.