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Pro tip: skip the cheap welding hood if you do this all day
I spent $90 on a no-name auto-darkening hood from Amazon when I started out. Thought it was fine until I was doing a 6-hour job at a refinery in Baton Rouge and got a killer headache and blurry vision by lunch. Turns out the cheap lens has a slow reaction time and poor shade consistency. My buddy let me borrow his Miller hood for the afternoon and it was night and day. I ended up dropping $350 on a used Big Window 2.0 from a pawn shop and my eyes thank me every day. Has anyone else had cheap hoods mess with your eyes or cause headaches on long jobs?
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chen.adam1mo ago
My Miller Big Window was a game changer for me too. I had that same cheap headache issue with a Harbor Freight hood on a long pipeline job down in Texas... lasted about three hours before my eyes were screaming at me. Swapped over to a used Speedglas I found at a welding supply shop for $200 and it fixed everything. No more squinting or guessing if the shade was right halfway through a bead. Now I tell every new guy to borrow a good hood for a full day before they buy anything cheap.
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Bought a cheap autodarkening hood off eBay one time and it worked fine for about a month until the battery died and it wouldn't darken at all. Had to weld a whole gate looking like a raccoon squinting through a fixed shade 10 lens while holding the thing up with my free hand. My neck hurt worse than my eyes by the time I was done.
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