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I am an electrician who worked with welders setting up pre-heating, and stress relief, and also repairing welding machines and welding with them just enough to test my repairs, I was taught how to weld with stick and gas, during my apprenticeship, but that was in the 70s, and not really don't any structural welding after I left my apprenticeship.
We have in essence three electric welders. AC at 50 Hz it not really that smooth, and needs some skill, the heat is 50/50 between the stick and the material being welded, which means not very good for welding aluminium and the like. Using an engine or inverter we also get welders using more like 600 Hz, it feels like DC, but it is still 50/50 heat wise. But a lot easier to use. Then we have DC, originally we used a rotary unit, the rotating mass resulted in a very smooth weld, and the heat is split 25/75 and one can select if the work or the stick has the most heat, used with stoving, not really sure how it all works something to do with welding up hill or down hill.
For all the above, all you need is welding set, and the leads.
Then we move to TIG and MIG, that's tungsten inert gas, and metal inert gas, the TIG uses a tungsten tip, and is very like welding with gas, and we have something like an ignition coil to start the spark, I used to repair those units, then we have MIG where a fill wire is auto fed to the work while you weld. With TIG you manually feed the filler wire, just like gas welding.
I think the extra bit you are talking about is the equipment to use TIG or MIG, what you have does not need any extras to stick weld.
We have in essence three electric welders. AC at 50 Hz it not really that smooth, and needs some skill, the heat is 50/50 between the stick and the material being welded, which means not very good for welding aluminium and the like. Using an engine or inverter we also get welders using more like 600 Hz, it feels like DC, but it is still 50/50 heat wise. But a lot easier to use. Then we have DC, originally we used a rotary unit, the rotating mass resulted in a very smooth weld, and the heat is split 25/75 and one can select if the work or the stick has the most heat, used with stoving, not really sure how it all works something to do with welding up hill or down hill.
For all the above, all you need is welding set, and the leads.
Then we move to TIG and MIG, that's tungsten inert gas, and metal inert gas, the TIG uses a tungsten tip, and is very like welding with gas, and we have something like an ignition coil to start the spark, I used to repair those units, then we have MIG where a fill wire is auto fed to the work while you weld. With TIG you manually feed the filler wire, just like gas welding.
I think the extra bit you are talking about is the equipment to use TIG or MIG, what you have does not need any extras to stick weld.
