- Joined
- October 6, 2008
- Messages
- 755
- Reaction score
- 84
- Location
- Va
- City, State
- chesapeake virginia
- Year, Model & Trim Level
- '96 xlt 4x4
Recently I've been looking into 24 to 36 volt reverse polarity DC stick welding and I pretty much already had everything I needed to have it on board welder all I had to do was make a jumper wire out of an old set of jumper cables have a good set of jumper cables have at least two 12 volt batteries something to Shield your eyes and some 6011 welding rods the concept is easy you connect the positive terminal of One battery to the negative terminal on the other then you take your jumper cables attached one into the positive side on One battery on in the other to the negative side of the other battery then attach the positive side (hints reverse polarity)to your work piece then use the negative side to attach your welding rod and bam! you have a stick welder capable of welding some pretty thick stuff. Because the amperage is not controlled by a machine you can only weld for a few seconds at a time but for a repair this setup is super simple super cheap and super effective and no longer will you worry about breaking things on the trail if you can simply weld it back together at least to the point where it can get you back to a paved Road. Two or three fully charged batteries should have more than enough power and them to repair whatever is needed and still have plenty of juice to start the vehicle. Of course two batteries will work and some people if not most actually use three batteries wired in series as explained above I don't want to go into it in any more detail just look it up on YouTube and with the 6011 (good for welding through paint and rust) welding rods the need for having a grinder and all that isn't all that important since this is just a temporary fix. Look at some videos on YouTube for further details I thought maybe by posting this you might learn something that you didn't know before and will be interested in bringing the supplies along with you on the trail to have this capability. I bring an extra deep cycle battery with me to power my refrigerator/cooler when the truck is off and as an emergency power Reserve in case I wake up to a dead battery. so I have two batteries on the trail and I already had jumper cables I just took the auto darkening unit out of my shield and stowed it in my box with a makeshift headband I already have gloves and a brush in my box I pretty much just needed to buy a pack of 6011 rods and make the jumper wire, to wire the batteries in series out of materials I had laying around the garage.i will be experimenting with this next week or maybe I'll have to use it this weekend on the trail but I hope not. Lol