I second what others have said about the deal you got on the welder. The one piece of advice I would give you is to carefully watch the duty cycle. If your welder is anything like my old transformer welder was, the duty cycle is only around 20% at the highest amperages. If you're welding on DC, you'll be maxing the thing out easily when running 1/8" 7018. So time about how long it takes to burn a rod and then calculate how many rods it takes you to exceed your duty cycle. Duty cycle is calculated as a number of minutes out of ten that you are burning rod. So if you have a 20% duty cycle, you can burn for two minutes out of every ten. If you find that it takes you about a minute to burn one rod, then you can burn two full rods every ten minutes at max output. Transformer welders are pretty hard to break, but the number one way you can break them (short of dropping something on them) is by overheating them and exceeding the duty cycle. This will cause the rectifiers in the DC circuit to fail quicker, and eventually will cause the insulation on the transformer winding to fail. Watch your duty cycle and that machine will be bulletproof for a long time.