Who writes this

Jean-Benoit Buisson

Every page on this site is written and signed by one person. This page says who, how the judgments are reached, and — just as importantly — what he is not.

How I got here

I live in Paris, in the Charente, and everything metal happens in half a garage with a concrete floor and a door that has never quite sealed. What I know about this equipment I learned by buying the wrong thing first: an inverter chosen on its headline amperage, which turned out to have a duty cycle that stopped it halfway down a 4 mm bead; a box of cutting discs for an arbor size that did not match the grinder; a tap set sold as a set, in which the only tap I needed was the one that snapped.

None of that was in the numbers on the box. All of it was in the numbers that were not — the duty cycle at a stated current, the arbor bore, the thread standard, the figure a listing gives in the wrong unit or contradicts two bullets further down. Reading that gap is the whole of what this site does.

What this site covers

Everything listed here is taken from the catalog of this site, and each entry links to its own page. When the catalog changes, this list changes with it. It is a list of what is covered — not a list of what I own.

What I care about

Three ideas behind every page on this site. The number that gets quoted is usually the wrong one — a welder sold on peak amperage rather than on its duty cycle at a working current, a grinder sold on watts rather than on whether it has a brake, a lathe sold on swing rather than on spindle bore. The consumable decides more than the machine — the wire, the electrode, the disc, the insert, and whether the one you can buy fits the one you already own. And the part that hurts you is the part you cannot see: welding fume, which is classified as carcinogenic to humans by the IARC, and which is the single subject a workshop full of exciting machines is guaranteed to skip.

What I am not

I am not a certified welder, a fabricator by trade, or a machine technician, and I have never worked for a manufacturer or a dealer. I hold no welding qualification and no coding certification. If you are looking for someone whose authority comes from a job title, this is not that site.

What each judgment rests on is stated on the page it appears on — see how a conclusion gets made here.

How I work

Every figure names its source: a manufacturer specification, a manual, a standard, or the weight of long-term owner reports.
No price, product reference or specification is ever invented. Where a figure is missing, the field is left empty and the gap is stated on the page.
Product references are verified against Amazon before publication, per market. Where a model is not sold in that store, you are sent to a local search rather than to a page that does not exist.
Where the cheap option wins, the page says the cheap option wins — and where the honest answer is a fixture you should make from offcuts rather than buy, it says that instead.

Why this site exists

Because welding machinery is sold on the wrong numbers. A welder is advertised on its maximum amperage, which almost nobody uses, rather than on its duty cycle at a stated temperature and on the quality of its wire feed — which decide every bead you will ever lay with it. Plasma cutters are sold on a severance thickness that leaves an edge you cannot weld. And consumables — the wire, the contact tip, the gas flow — are treated as afterthoughts when they are usually the actual fix.

There is also a part of this that is not about buying anything. Welding fume has been classified as a Group 1 carcinogen by the IARC since 2017, mild steel included; the harmful fraction is the part you cannot see, and it is the one subject a workshop full of exciting machines is guaranteed to skip. It is not skipped here.

Correcting me

If something here is wrong, tell me and I will fix it and date the correction on the page. Write to [email protected].

Jean-Benoit Buisson · Paris, France