I looked on Craig's List for awhile and finally found a welder whose price would not empty my wallet too much. Although I wanted to get a unit that also did DC, I couldn't find one in the price range that I was wanting. As such, I ended up with the Lincoln AC-255 "Tombstone" unit. It was in pretty good shape except for the power switch being missing. The previous owner said that he wasn't willing to pay the $80 for a new switch and just wired it straight across the switch and used the circuit breaker to turn the switch off. It has copper wiring supposedly. The ground clamp probably could use replacing since it is too loose to clamp to thin metal, but it didn't prevent me from being able to test it out today on a piece of heavily rusted 2" angle iron. I took a closer look at my circuit breaker box today, removed one of the breakers, and took it up to Home Depot to see if I could get a matching type of breaker in a 50A size. Turned out that they had the 50A and 60A breakers in that type for less than $15. I went with the 60A breaker and 10 ft of UF 6-3 which they let me have for the same cost as the regular 6-3 which was on a pallet on a top shelf and they couldn't easily get at that time. I also picked up the receptacle for the plug. Total cost of parts were probably less than $55. A little bit of research on the web to find out how to wire a 220V circuit (turns out the neutral wire doesn't get used with this plug, so a 6-2 wire would have been acceptable) and some holes drilled in the wall studs so that I could run the wire a bit further toward the center of the rear wall of the garage and I had a completed installation. This is the first time I worked with a
220V circuit. The 6-gauge UF type wire was a pain to work with and strip (well, at least with a pocket knife). I managed to get it wired up on a hot circuit without frying myself which is always a good thing. Turning the circuit breaker on and nothing smoked, so I was getting a pretty good feeling about the project. I took out the multimeter and tested the voltage between each blade and ground (110V) and between the two blades (220V) and got an even better feeling about the project. I plugged in the welder and it started humming which really got me feeling a bit cocky. Put the welder on 75A and ran a few beads and they turned out good. Put the welder on 225A and ran a few beads and they turned out good as long as I moved the electrode quick enough to prevent a burn through.As I was putting the cover back on the breaker box, I noticed a piece of
3/8" rebar sitting on my work bench and wondered if it would be possible to weld with it. Perhaps I was starting to feel a bit too overconfident at that point. ;) I guess I'll leave that experiment for some other day when I have some 1/2" steel to weld.