Welding 101...
Last week I took the kidling to his 4-H Welding meeting. At 12, he's the youngest one there (most of them are 15+) and he seems to be enjoying it. His project is a small trailer that we're going to use to haul around a 125-gallon plastic water-tank to water the trees and other plants around the farm. He greatly prefers the MIG welder over the stick (arc) welder, mostly because it's a lot easier to use. As a result, the instructor made him do more practicing with the arc welder, and I got to try my hand at it as well!
Right off, I can say that it's a lot harder than it looks! Of course the instructor makes it look easy, he's been doing it for over 20 years! He gave me a small chunk of scrap-iron, and told me to just lay a bead down the length. The hardest part is just "striking the arc"; You have to sort of "tap" the tip of the rod against the metal until it arcs, then move the rod along where you want to weld. You need to keep the rod just above your work so that you actually have an arc, but not so far away that the arc goes out. At the same time, you don't want to touch the rod to the work, or it will stick! That's what happened at the end there, with the last bit of rod firmly attached to the work. Not a great job, but not bad for a first try, with only about 10 seconds worth of instruction. :)
I can see where the auto-darkening helmets can be popular; They automatically go from clear to dark when they're triggered by the blast of UV light from the arc (in about 1/20,000th of a second!) This allows you to clearly see your work before (and while) striking the arc, but still protecting your eyes from the intense UV light. I didn't get to use one of these fancy toys though, I had to make do with the old-fashioned helmets which meant I was pretty much stabbing at the scrap-iron blindly until the arc lit it up.
It's a good thing that I have a huge pile of rods that I got cheaply at the auction sales. It's going to take a lot of practice to get good at this! Of course, first I really need to get the shop cleaned up and uncluttered so I don't set anything on fire!