Oddly enough, the tiny $99 MIG welder I bought from them finally laid down a decent bead! Took quite a bit of tinkering and some good flux cored wire (not from HF), but finally got the wire speed dialed in and figured out that I had the tension set improperly on the wire feeder this whole time. Not surprisingly on my part, but I did get it to lay a bead on some 12 gauge steel (kinda like what's used on the bed of my 52) and will be using it to fill in where the PO decided to half cut the bed side. Still not sure what was going on there, but whatever.
For those interested, here was my welder setup mistake:
The tensioner that feeds the wire through needed to be tightened up to where I could barely get it to flip back over in locked position. The issue was discovered when I was trying to dial in the wire speed for the low voltage setting. I started at the max setting and was working back down. It would feed sporadically at best, so there was a very slight hesitation when the wire would feed through. So slight that the auto darkening helmet I was using (also from HF) wouldn't have time to lighten up. But it was noticeable in both feel and how the bead looked.
