Slick shifty stuff

This past weekend I spent some time with this titan from the past:

 Talk about beastly! I haven't used a big transformer box in years. Honestly, the new inverter boxes really do spoil you. This thing is as basic as it gets. 60Hz AC. Rectified DC. Tapped power ranges. Huge input current spikes. Popping the breaker. LOL! Good times.

That being said, if you can feed it, it will run absolutely well, and a far cry better than the sad excuses for welders you tend to see cheapskates with these days.

The other adventure was using undersized electrodes of an unidentified type. I was doing some simple mods to this:

I added an IAT bung (popping the breaker until the whole thing was preheated enough to weld decently without mashing the go pedal all the way On the second power tap, so about 130A).

Here's a way overexposed shot of the bung:

It came out fairly decently even though I haven't done any aluminium TIG in over a year!

The last bit was to flip the BOV bung 180*, which I did:

Overall decent, though far from perfect welding. It'll hold, that's for sure.

Note: that is not my welding on the BOV bung. I would have at least smoothed that out, but with the skinny tungsten and the breaker popping, I didn't want to start something that I couldn't finish.

Yay for TIG welding. :)