Hi all! I just bought my first welder, after attempting to rewire a pair of power transformers. I'd rather put the effort in and do it right, than lose all kinds of effort with something that won't hold up over time.
Someday I'd like to build a catamaran from oil drums when I'm confident in my welds. I have an idea about being able to use a 20' or 25' trailer for a 40' or 50' catamaran by transporting it 4-drums wide, so that each hull can be divided into two and stowed in parallel on a crank mechanism. The thought was it could be deployed into water, and then lengthened to full length and then widened on another crank to its full size. There are a number of engineering challenges to this, which is what entertains me. Living in the Great Lakes region, I'd love to own a watercraft but they're so expensive and as the old adage goes, "there are only two good days owning a boat: the day you buy it, and the day you sell it." And what I'm looking at building would probably cost half a million dollars, retail.
But I'm not there yet! I am still making tools from other tools to make bigger tools. The homemade welder was a flop, I basically have a portable spot-welder, even though it's "switchable" and 2-gauge coils. I just couldn't get the efficiency to create a hot enough arc for anything else. I need the welder to fabricate some foundry tools. I need the foundry to make lots of other things, such as bronze propellers which would be prohibitively expensive on my current budget.
So I have my fingers in all kinds of things. I am a database administrator and software engineer by day, and lots of other things when I'm not at the office. I just purchased a nice DC stick welder, and I'm hoping I can pair it with my generator and get the full duty cycle out of it, which is only 30%, but still. I'm hoping many of you have advice on that.
I hope I learn lots here and ask lots of questions!
