Had a wee bit of fun this weekend...
Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2012 8:23 am
Well it all started with the crap lucky purchase of a Linde 225 welder from a co-worker that he was looking to unload because he was moving into a housing community. It's an old machine for sure, he used it at his old job for a few years and they let him buy it off of them for cheap because they owed him overtime money. Either way I got it for a mere $250, that included two gas bottles, a regulator and a new 40lb spool of .035 wire $100 value alone on the wire.
Only after I got it home did it click in my head that a 225 amp welder probably runs on 50amps and not 30 like I have in my garage. So on comes the fun part.
I have assumed now that both the wire for my Directv dish and the power wire for the garage were in PVC pipes... Now I assumed this because at the house and garage there was a 1" pipe for each item and two box ends going in to the house and into the garage... boy was I wrong... First attempt at pulling the old 10/3 wire out I realized that was totally not in any pipe, only from the house wall to the ground it was in the pipe... The rest was burried. Now for the coax it was in 95% of a pipe... it stopped 1ft short of the down tube on the garage side and was just burried the rest of the way.
After finding this out I ended up with this...
Thank god the ground wasn't frozen...
I now have a 2" pipe with 6ga running out for the 60amp garage panel, and a 10ga run coming back for generator backfeed to my main panel, and a 1" pipe with 5 coax wires in it, 4 for the dish and 1 return for a tv in the garage now, that was one thing I wanted done. And yesterday after thinking about it I just decided to run a second 1" pipe for an extra to just have if I ever need to run something out there.
Oh and the welder works pretty sweet. It has an automatic spot welding feature that I can setup to stay on for X amount of time and stay off for X amount of time.
Also for shits and giggles... I acquired a $350 50amp Plasma, 200amp Tig/Stick welding machine from e-bay... For $350 I figure what the hell, lets see what it can do. It might work perfectly fine for the load I'm going to put on it.
Only after I got it home did it click in my head that a 225 amp welder probably runs on 50amps and not 30 like I have in my garage. So on comes the fun part.
I have assumed now that both the wire for my Directv dish and the power wire for the garage were in PVC pipes... Now I assumed this because at the house and garage there was a 1" pipe for each item and two box ends going in to the house and into the garage... boy was I wrong... First attempt at pulling the old 10/3 wire out I realized that was totally not in any pipe, only from the house wall to the ground it was in the pipe... The rest was burried. Now for the coax it was in 95% of a pipe... it stopped 1ft short of the down tube on the garage side and was just burried the rest of the way.
After finding this out I ended up with this...
Thank god the ground wasn't frozen...
I now have a 2" pipe with 6ga running out for the 60amp garage panel, and a 10ga run coming back for generator backfeed to my main panel, and a 1" pipe with 5 coax wires in it, 4 for the dish and 1 return for a tv in the garage now, that was one thing I wanted done. And yesterday after thinking about it I just decided to run a second 1" pipe for an extra to just have if I ever need to run something out there.
Oh and the welder works pretty sweet. It has an automatic spot welding feature that I can setup to stay on for X amount of time and stay off for X amount of time.
Also for shits and giggles... I acquired a $350 50amp Plasma, 200amp Tig/Stick welding machine from e-bay... For $350 I figure what the hell, lets see what it can do. It might work perfectly fine for the load I'm going to put on it.
