As promised, I tried out the new welder today. The 20oz Gatorade bottle is there for scale. Tiny bugger.
This is what it is replacing. An antique.
Here is what I'm attempting to repair. Think I bit off more than I can chew.
Prep.
No pictures of the repair itself because there was nothing there to fix. A quarter inch below the drilled hole, the steel was paper thin. A waste of time.
I grabbed some scrap metal and smoked a few rods. First off, I haven't used a stick welder in at least fifteen years. So, it took a bit of practice to get the hang of striking and maintaining an arc again. I was using 1/16" 6013 rod. The welder instructions states that rod of that size should use a setting from 20 to 40 amps, the rods state 20 to 50. I started at 30 found it too cold. I found that 44 amps worked well on the 1/8" scrap I was practicing on. That got me good penetration and a fairly flat, if ugly, weld. I will need to retrain myself to control the puddle to get something resembling a nice weld.
About the welder. 110 volt, small, light weight, easy to set up. Even comes with a shoulder strap. I may or may not use the strap. At this point, the machine is better than the monkey making smoke.
After going through Welds' thread on Linda's Utility Trailer, I read where ripcuda modified his welding cart to hold both of his units. Great Idea. As I don't have a cart, I went shopping today. Found this Lincoln cart on sale at Farm and Fleet.
http://www.farmandfleet.com/products...ding-cart.html
As both my stick welder and plasma cutter are pretty small, I can probably get both on the cart along with the flux core machine without too much hassle. That would free up some space under my bench.
BTW, the new stick welder looks lonely on the new cart. Scored some 1/16" 7018 rods on clearance, too.
