Of course, when you get a new welder, you either make your own cart or buy one. Kevin shows the basic cart he bought: the black base on the bottom, the black tower behind which the welding gas bottle sits.
Then he shows an accessory you can buy, a black bar that runs across the top of the welder, where it is screws into the top of the machine. The bar also bolts into the tower to help clamp everything together. So that’s the basic cart.
How did Kevin modify it? The first thing he did was add a handle to make it easier to move.
Then, because the cart and machine do not come with it, he built a cable rack to keep the 3 different types of cables, grounds, stingers and TIG torch under control. He added a piece of 1″ stock to hold 1/8″ plate, 4″ wide with some “ears” to stack all the cables on. That’s also a good place to hang your helmet at the end of the day.
Because it’s a TIG welder, it has a foot pedal, so he added a little plate with some “ears” on top to hold it. The foot pedal cable gets coiled up and hung on the on the cable rack, too. He also added a couple of tubes, one on each side for his filler rod. He capped their bottoms, then 3D-printed dividers that sit down inside the tube to make 4 different compartments for his filler rod.
Because this Everlast 275 Lightning is a dual voltage welder, Kevin found a little spot for the power adapter. As an MTS machine, you use 2 gases, a mixed gas for MIG and straight argon for TIG. The original cart comes with only 1 spot for a bottle so Kevin shows how he added an extension – now it’s a 2-bottle cart. All he has to do is switch the controls on the front to go from one mode of welding to the other.
But he got himself in trouble. You have 100 pounds of welder and cooler. You have the weight of the cart itself and roughly 225 pounds of bottles. So the whole thing is pushing 350 – 375 pounds. The stock wheels that were on the back of the cart started developing a flat spot and was hard to move. Finally, the tires’ rubber started to break down and come off the steel rim. So now the welding cart needed another upgrade.
Kevin got a slightly bigger diameter pair of wheels that are all steel with just a little bit of urethane on the very outside edge for a tire for the back and a new set of urethane wheels for the front. Now you can just about blow on the cart to move it across shop.
Kevin hopes this free how to video is helpful so you can make your own cart and adapt it to your own needs. He asks you to leave your comments down below and hit that notification bell to see the new videos when they come out.
Before you go, don’t miss his religious epiphany ….