Friday March 31, 2023 Guerneville CA.
Halibut
My brother Tom had been out in the San Francisco Bay fishing in a fishing boat yesterday. That meant I got some fresh fish. I took it home and cooked some of it up. Yummy.
Old cracked wires
The other day I had some sparks on the wires of my main arc welder. No big deal but the wires sparked and melted and blew the circuit breakers. Fifty amps makes some nice sparks.
The reason for all the sparks was these welder supply wire’s insulation is all cracked from age. This wasn’t the end that sparked. I tend to hook up my welders this was as there are just too many types of plugs and I usually have the wrong ones for when I need to match them up.
Anyway, I need to replace the wires with the cracks so I disconnected these wires.
I didn’t need the longer extension wires anymore that were cracked and hooked the welder up without the bad wires, like this.
I needed to do that because I need the man welder to weld some steel together to fix the old bridge that took some damage during a big rain storm awhile back.
Getting power at the old bridge
Once that was done, I went out to the old bridge to cut into the 220 power that crosses the bridge so I can hook up another welder to work on the bridge. I’ll splice the welder wires into the power here to run the welder to do the work.
Old welder repairs
Next, it was get this old welder out and do some repairs on it so I can use it on the bridge.
I’ve used this one before, but it’s been sitting around doing nothing for a number of years, but now it needs to wake up and get to work.
The extension cable on top of the welder was all cracked so I threw that away, right away.
The power leads going into the welder were also cracked and needed to be replaced.
I removed the cover on the welder so I could work on it. I started by blowing it off with air.
Then I removed the old cracked wires to be replaced by better old wires that weren’t cracked.
Won’t adjust
The old welder had another problem. The adjuster was frozen up and wouldn’t turn to adjust the welder. The sliders were mostly rusted up so I loosened them up and put oil on them and worked them back and forth until I got them to slide again.
Then I put a coat of silicone grease on them to make them work better and last longer.
I put a coat of oil on the rest of the stuff, that’s the black stuff on the ground. Then I installed that big cable on the left for the power cord. It’s old but no cracks in it. Most of this stuff was scrounged a long time ago by me and my brother Tom, witch is good as if you buy this stuff now, it costs a small fortune.
Of course the cable had the wrong plug on it so I removed it as I’ll hook it up without a plug as there’s no plug out on the old bridge.
Enjoying the day
After that, I did some chair hopping around the yard and moved some stuff into my new shed. 
Nice day.
