Millermatic 200

Joe Dokes said

Yes, for best results on sheet metal .023 is essential when using a 220 welder. You can buy a 2Lb spool at Home Depot for $11.47 and 2Lbs is quite a bit of welding.

The thinner wire puts less heat into the material, considering that you can't slow down the wire feed speed as much on a 220 machine as a 110 machine, the thinner wire helps a lot.

Regards,

Joe Dokes

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Coming from a journeyman welder, you are exactly correct.
I may ad, the 220 gives you a better stability of the arc and better welding quality. If you have 3 phase power, i have welded sheetmetal (quarter panels) with .030 wire with good results. I wouldn't reccomend it for an amature though. You really have to turn the voltage (penetration) and wire feed speed (heat) down a lot to achieve good results. Spacing your welds about a foot apart and hammer and dollying the weld before it cools helps a lot. Heat and distortion is your enemy. You are really looking at tacking and moving along until all the welds meet. This takes a lot of time and patience to work your way around the panel.
I would definitely use .023 wire for body panels if you can, and forget about flux core or ''innershield'' gasless wire. It's not really a whole lot of trouble to change wire sizes. 5 minutes and you are done max.
Don't use straight CO/2 for shielding gas, use argon/CO/2 75% 25% commonly known as liquid air ''blueshield''.
I hope this helps you, and good luck!
Tom.