Shawn_howell

I found a Lincoln Thunderbolt AC/DC arc welder on good ole craigslist with a tig torch for $300 and then I found another guy with a pair of 50lb CO2 for $50 each. I grabbed all of the above and traded the CO2 bottles for an 122 cu.ft. Argon bottle and a 122 cu.ft. Oxygen bottle for a spare for my torches. I'm picking up a flowmeter later today for the argon bottle and can start my trial and error classes maybe tomorrow. Worst case scenario is that I have a decent arc welder and know I don't know how to tig, but I'm a pretty stubborn S.O.B. So I'll probably end up being a mediocre tig welder for quite a while. Wish me luck. Lol.

I've always had to do all my learning by trial and error and error and error. I grew up in a household with few resources and had to make my way through without little to no real training. If I wanted a bicycle I had to learn how the worked and build one from spare parts I could find at the dump/garage sales for instance. Whats the reference to the SNOW machine?

Man! There's a lot to reply to here. For starters, the donor bike in the pictures is (was) a complete, working, running 84 Venture Royale. The only thing I haven't seen work is the radio but in disassembly I found two blown fuses, so who knows. Maybe I'll grab a couple fuses and plug it all back in just to see. The fairings aren't in great condition, but are complete minus one of the side covers. I won't be using or keeping much of anything that's not in the pics so if you're looking for something let me know. I have gotten rid of the original Tci (which was faulty) in favor of the Ignitech replacement and am switching over to COPs. The coils are fine as far as I can tell but I want that space open for other things. I do do have some self taught welding experience and do own my own torches and junk mig welder. It's one of those Swedish things that I tore down and installed a better mig gun and a gas valve so I could run it as a real mig instead of just a wire feed. I also installed power lugs so I can reverse polarity to go back to wire feed as necessary. One of these days I'll pick up a new one. I wouldn't weld a tank with it. I certainly don't have tons of play money laying around, but have been a professional mechanic for some time now and have amassed a fair collection of tools and experience. I've been thinking that a tig would be on my shopping list for sometime now and this just might be the time to splurge on it. I'm talking with a guy that has a Miller thunderbolt ac/dc welder already running a tig gun on it for $350 (no argon tank for that price). That doesn't seem like a terrible deal considering I could make use of the arc welder as well. Buying a tool like that to learn the skills I need is kind of how I am. I decided one day that I wanted to learn how to run a metal lathe. Now I own a 13 inch South Bend and know how to run it. Kinda.

Guess it's time to start trolling craigslist for an old scratch start tig setup then. Wish I'd planted that money tree years ago.

I guess I can't figure out how to rotate the images.

I'm working on a bobber rat bike style build and need an old sporty tank about 5" wider than it currently is and don't hear any TIG access. I have a ton of decent parts I won't be using and SOME cash. I'd love the opportunity to learn how to TIG and you won't even have to do the work. Any takers?

I found a guy that had one of these boxes for sale used but doesn't have the software cd for it. Does anyone have a copy you could email me?