A while ago someone mentioned that you can take a good AC/DC arc welder and get a strike tig gun for it. I am very curious to know of anyone that has done this and what the costs/benefits/aspects that suck about creating a Tig welder this way.

I have an old Lincoln Stick coming that is very nice. Just trying to find out if the Tig gun is a good idea or not..

it works pretty good, i have done it a thousand times. you need a good d/c welder a bottle of argon and a hot head torch. once you set your amperage you use your speed for fine tuning your weld. this will be a scratch start because you will have no high freq availible on your stick machine. set your machine on d/c straight and play. i have picked up 3 hot head torch set ups with gauges in pawn shops for around 100 bucks. you will find them in places that have big industries around. i used to be a millwrite and that is what i did 90% of my welding with in food processing plants. try it out, you can get damn good with some practice. i used to weld miles of sec 5 s/s pipe in the over heads of plants with a little 110v miller inverter welder with a hot head torch. just used a real long argon hose. these torches are all air cooled so if you plan on doing big stuff forget it. they get way to hot to hold, even with gloves on.

This will work fine for steel and ferrous alloys once you have the amperage dialed in, but welding aluminum will be difficult without HF to stabilize the AC arc. Scratch starting off of a piece copper will help prevent contamination of electrode with iron.

Centry hasa high frequency box that you can add to your welder for about $250

Yep a HF box, but still no foot pedal.