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Hi, 720Deere A young guy I know was given one by his grandfather about a year ago. He didn't have a place to use it so he left it with me and would come by to practice with it from time to time. He invited me to use it whenever I wanted. I got a few hours of practice in with it because I was interested in seeing how AC stick welding differed from DC. I thought it was a good machine. I liked the high duty cycle. If by continuous duty you mean the gauge shows the 100% duty cycle to be pretty high, I don't think its that unusual. If I'm not mistaken, any transformer type stick welder has a duty cycle that increases as the amperage is reduced---it's the nature of that setup. Lincoln claims that their 225 amp buzzbox has a 20% duty cycle at all settings, but this is not true. They're just being excessively conservative. The Montgomery Ward welder has one feature that I didn't understand until I opened up the box to clean it. There's a crank on it (I can't remember where it is) that you loosen to slide the amperage lever to the setting you want, then tighten it up again. The crank keeps the shunt from slipping as you use the welder so your setting doesn't change. Welders with infinite adjustment---those you adjust with a lever or crank---are subject to slipping during use. Those with fixed settings, like the Lincoln buzzbox, won't slip, but can't be fine tuned. I thought the MW welder's solution to this problem was pretty clever. The welder I had here also had two electrode outlets. One was the low range, the other was the high range but also said 6013 electrodes only. I happened to have a a lot of 6013 rod, so I used it to test the high range. Thinking about it later, though, I decided it was mainly nonsense. The machine puts out a certain amount of current, period. There's no feedback about what you choose to put in the electrode holder. I think you got a really good AC welder. All the best, Stan
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