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Hi Nat, I don't have experience with Campbell Hausfield equipment of any type but I can tell you some of the problems you can run into with a cheap stick welder. Short duty cycle: You don't buy a 225 amp welder because you'll ever do much home workshop welding at 200 amps or more. (You won't.) You buy it so that you can weld at 100 amps for more than 30 seconds of every ten minute period. Some cheap welders will claim to have a top end of 100 amps (for instance) but in their specs it will show a duty cycle of 5% at 90 amps. That means two things. It means that at 90 amps in any 10 minute period you can weld a TOTAL of 30 seconds and have to let the machine cool the other 570 seconds. And it means that you don't know what the duty cycle is at 100 amps except that it's less than 5%. Picky about rods: All low OCV (open circuit voltage) stick welders including Lincolns, Millers, and Hobarts tend to not run well on every size and type and brand of electrode. But if you run across 2 or 3 that a Lincoln 225 amp buzzbox doesn't handle well, you might have trouble finding that many that a 100 amp Campbell Hausfield, or Chicago Electric, or Century, or Speedway, or Schumacher (to name a few) DOES handle well. Unless you have some way of trying electrodes without having to buy a few pounds at a time of every combination of 3/32", 1/8", 6011, 6013, 7014, 7018AC, Lincoln, Weld-It, Hobart, Easy-Arc, and so on, you might spend more than the difference you would have paid for a quality machine just trying to find something you can weld decently with. Poor arc quality: I don't think any low end stick welders are manufactured with copper wound transformers nowadays, but some are better than others anyway. My experience with cheap stick welders (quite a bit, actually) is that they either don't put out as much current as they claim, or something about the electronics makes the arc difficult to maintain. Either way, you'll find that whereas with a quality welder you can strike an arc with a 3/32" 6013 electrode at only 40 amps, for example, a cheap welder might not even act like it's turned on with the same electrode until you have it cranked to 80. In the worst cases your welder either won't let you strike an arc with a 1/8" electrode, or maybe even with a 3/32", or will only do so with it cranked to its highest setting (and lowest duty cycle). If you buy a welder that won't weld with 3/32" electrodes, you're not in luck. There's a big price jump per pound for 1/16" and 5/64" electrodes and they aren't available everywhere. Those are some but not all of the shortcomings you might encounter buying too cheap a welder. There's one other general problem. Stick welding isn't easy. With the very best equipment it still takes a lot of practice to do it well. Low end equipment might prevent you from ever being able to do a good job, or it might discourage you from even wanting to put in the time it takes. I used to regularly make the mistake of telling myself, "I'll get a cheap (whatever) and see if I like it. If I do then I'll get a good one." Well, aside from the problem that you're less likely to buy a piece of equipment that you already have one of---even if the one you have is a POS---the real problem is that trying a cheap anything, whether it's a hunting rifle, a table saw, or a stick welder is likely to make you decide you just don't care for that activity.
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