I'll give my 100% honest review. I've been a die-hard blue fan for years. My personal welder, in my 1000 s.f. home shop is a Miller 220. It has served me well. AC/DC, mig, stick, tig, and I have a spool gun. It's the perfect welder for an all-in-one setup.
My business had a 6 month project where we had alot of beam prep and welding of pre-fabricated FE/BR (forced entry ballistic rated) mild steel wall panels. These panels were mostly 1/4" plate welded to square tube frames that needed to be continuously welded. I heard of Everlast welders and decided to give them a try. In hindsight, with the amount of welding, we should have purchased a 300A+ machine to handle the duty cycle but I settled on a 263PI and also bought a 82i plasma.
My employees beat the snot out of the welder and it kept up. I know they hit it's duty cycle a couple of times but after a cooldown, it went back into production. Here are a couple of things to consider..
1. It uses Euro Kwik-connect mig-guns. The 36-series mig gun was not up to the challenge we put it through. We had to upgrade to a tweco classic 400A and the men were much happier. The ceramic diffuser in the 36-series cooked.
2. It uses metric consumables. Both the mig gun and drive rolls are metric designations. It's ok for intelligent people. I keep a cross-reference chart in the case and one taped to the machine but production guys overlook this stuff. Don't expect your local weld supply shop to carry M6 or M8 contact tips. However, if you do purchase a Tweco mig gun with a Euro Kwik-connect fitting, expect to pay for for that gun than a standard miller or Lincoln welder style US connection. Oh, and the Tweco (with the EU connection) uses imperial consumables. Make sure you have plenty of stock on metric consumables. It has frequently taken 5-10 business days to replenish metric consumables, purchased off the interweb.
3. The settings are not user friendly. It takes alot of fiddling around to figure out which settings work best for the type of welding, position, and person doing the welding. We found that with the "power set" feature, these machines run hot.. And I've heard this from others, too.
The sales team, Olga & Alec are great. If you have questions on their machines, they call in Jesse, their weld tech, and he knows the machines inside and out. However, I've yet to experience an issue with any of the everlast machines so I cannot comment on warranty issues. I do know that if there's an issue, they work with YOU to diagnose and then they send you parts and YOU have to repair yourself.
All things considered, recently I had to make a decision on additional welding equipment for another project that will consume around 2,500 lbs. of mig wire and it needed one dedicated machine that could handle 250A @ 100% duty cycle. This definitely requires a 350A+ machine. In the end, I'm taking a gamble with another 2 green machines purchasing a 353dPi for the grunt welding and another 263PI (both 263Pi machines will be backups.) With the purchase of these 3 machines, I'm also purchasing more tweco mig guns, preparing myself for all options to make sure production is steady. With my entire equipment budget spent on 3 machines and two tweco guns, I'm still ahead of the game should I have purchased a 350A Miller or Lincoln.
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It's the price of the 2 welders I have shown on the screenshot!
