Quote:
Originally Posted by HermitJohn
You can WELD with a battery and set jumper cables and some rod, not real nice looking weld, cause you dont have lot control, but yep, can join two chunks quarter inch steel without lot trouble.
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yes, and with practice and some ingenuity a darn good possibility to do some fine welding. Especially if you up the battery count and use 24 volts.
BUT:
I will relate an experience I had that is well worth reading.
Many years ago I was a service technician at an auto manufacturing facility at Belvidere Illinois.
Car plants are huge so we had golf carts to haul ourselves and our tools around when we serviced things.
I was very proud of my welding set-up I put on my cart.
I used 4 of the 6 volt on-board batteries for welding. I added a PWM controller to the welding circuitry I had built and with the PWM controller I could dial in the weld amperage to a very specific setting and weld up a storm.
It was used so often it became a sought after piece of equipment.
It became such a common welder to use it became second nature to just use the cart whenever welding needed to be done.
Until the one fateful day.
I needed to weld part of the frame of the cart one day so I just grabbed the weld lead on the golf cart, not thinking or bothering to check to see if the cart's battery charger was plugged in.
Well it was and not long into the weld repair, and yes, there was a hell of an explosion! Three of the 6 batteries were gone! Totally gone.
Shrapnel everywhere and hospital with loss-time.
It was UGLY, and painful.
But I learned a valuable lesson.
Be careful and be aware of the outcome of all your actions.
Keep the darn welding sparks well away from the batteries and do not have the charger turned on and plugged in if there are any sparks or open flames in the vicinity.
live and learn
