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Hi Roy, I'm interested to find out what stuff you weld would be a lot easier with a DC welder. At the welding shop at the community college where I'm an assistant there are nothing but DC welders, and about 95% of them are three phase. At home I have AC/DC stick welders, and 1 Lincoln AC buzzbox. My feeling is that DC welding current is better than AC in much the same way that Coke is better than Pepsi, or vice versa. What I mean is that I think you'd have to be a skilled professional operator with thousands and thousands of hours of welding time under your belt to be able to tell the difference in blind testing. And if you were, you could do things with an AC welder that occasional users can barely imagine. Cheap, AC only welders are often hard to weld with, but so are cheap AC/DC welders. 225 amp Lincoln buzzboxes, on the other hand, are great machines. You can't run 6010 well, if at all, on any AC welder, but you can run its equivalent, 6011, all day long on one. Most 7018 electrodes run poorly on low OCV AC machines, but Lincoln makes several varieties besides their 7018AC that are specifically engineered for that application. 6013, 6027, 7014, and 7024 work just as well on AC as on DC in my experience. In fact, the only relatively common electrode I know of that runs only on DC and has no AC equivalent is 6012, and I'd be astonished if that was the use you're looking for. Almost nobody uses it nowadays. The feeling I get is that a lot of people find stick welding difficult and blame it on their AC welder. But stick welding IS difficult. What makes it easier isn't DC current, it's 10,000 rods worth of practice, give or take. No joke. All the best, Stan
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