More Fun with Electricity
A few weeks ago I was at a friend’s house. He had a Miller 225 AMP stick welder in his garage that has been sitting idle for years. Having been a welder in a previous job a couple of decades ago, I knew the benefits of owning one of these glorious steel binders. So I bought it from him.
It had been sitting in the corner of the garage waiting for the day when I would need to bond steel to steel. That day finally came this weekend when my coupler base cracked on my trailer. Excited to get back into the game of molten metal and homemade lightening, I rushed out to Northern Tools and bought a triangular ball hitch rated for 10,000 pounds to put on my 6,000 lb capacity trailer. I carried it home, along with a full box of 6011 rods, welding gloves, and a brand new fancy auto-darkening welding helmet.
Of course, the only 220 volt circuit available in my garage was wired directly into the switch on my air compressor. I made a pit stop at Lowe’s to gather supplies to rectify that situation.
Arriving home, I began to unroll twenty-five feet of Romex electrical wire in the garage. At that moment, the arch-nemeses of Frazier electrical projects materialized in the doorway. Robin asked me what I was doing.
“Just hooking up my new welder.” I replied.
She looked at the end of the cord attached to the welder. “Well, don’t you just plug it in?” Girls.
In my most patient tone reserved for women who don’t know anything about electricity (other than it causes me to convulse on the floor and costs lots of money in replacement capacitors and compressor motors when I’m monkeying with it) I told her, “No, it’s 220 volts, just like the compressor.”
I can’t repeat what she said here, but suffice it to say Captain Jack Sparrow would have been shocked and impressed. She told me to call an electrician.
The argument that ensued lasted a while, but in the end I flatly refused even though she wouldn’t agree that I’d learned enough about electricity from the great air compressor adventure and now knew what I was doing.
She went into the house, presumably to get a fire extinguisher and set the 911 speed dial button up on the phone.
Having learned from all my other electrifying adventures, I went to the breaker box and shut off the main. Robin reappeared like the balrog at the bridge of Kazud-Doom and asked why the electricity had gone off in the house.
I tried not to sound exasperated or patronizing. “So I won’t shock my gonads off when I start handling the 220 wires that I’m going to disconnect from the air compressor and hook up to the outlet for the welder.”
“Well, how long is it going to be off? And why aren’t you wearing your safety glasses?”
There she went with the safety glasses again. Her pet regulation. “About twenty minutes, okay? Longer if you keep bugging me.” I didn’t need to add the last part, but sometimes my mouth outruns my brain.
She handed my safety glasses to me, stood there until I had put them on, then she muttered an incantation and disappeared, probably transporting herself back to the front of the house to continue repairing and painting over all my gaps in the trim work I’d installed around the bay windows. I’m an excellent woodworker, and can put mitered edges together with no discernable gaps, but it’s always good to intentionally leave some so Robin has extra things to do while I’m rolling on the floor in pain back in the garage and trying to cover up the latest stupid injury I’ve caused myself.
I took the safety glasses off and proceeded to detach the wiring from my air compressor. In about fifteen minutes I had the receptacle for the welder wired in and was standing at the breaker box ready to flip on the main. I closed my eyes and breathed a prayer. I flipped the switch and the electricity came on. I could hear the quiet hum as the refrigerator in the garage returned to life. Opening my eyes I saw that the fluorescent light in the garage was back on. No smoke, no sparks, and no explosions.
I rushed into the house, yelling in elation for my sweet, patient wife. “Robin! Robin, come quick!”
I heard the ladder outside bang against the wall and the front door flew open as Robin burst in, nearly tripping over the three dogs we have that like to lie in that doorway whenever we are outside and may have to come in a hurry.
“What!? What did you do? Are you okay? Should I call an ambulance?” She fired the questions rapidly and breathlessly, her face twisted with concern and her finger poised over the 911 button on the cordless phone.
“No, Babe, I just wanted to show you I wired it all in and it didn’t blow up.”
She impressed Jack Sparrow again and stomped back out the front door. Women.
I went back to the garage and plugged the welder into the new receptacle. Flipping the switch to the “on” position was satisfying. A low hum emitted from the machine. I hooked up the ground to a bare spot on the trailer, placed a rod in the clamp, and started to weld my first bead in twenty years.
Blinking, eyes stinging, and with tiny burns covering my hand from splatters of molten steel, I dazedly went back to the garage to find my new welding helmet and gloves.
The new hitch works great, by the way.
