90 amps ought get you in the ballpark. Might be a little hot but if it burns through, turn it down a bit. If I was doing the repairs to the cracks you show, I would plan on grooving out the cracks as well as I could with an abrasive disc cutoff tool, or at least grind it out some.
Then weld up the cracks and grind them down smooth on top. Then I would weld in some pieces of angle iron to reinforce the places where the cracks were.
But, you can try your luck without reinforcing if you don't want to go to the trouble now.

 

I have an old Gearmore, looks almost the same, no cracks but a whole lot more dents in it.

Once one of the four mounting bolts for the gearbox came came out, (on mine nut on top bolt dropped to who knows where). Didnt have many tools back then, so I got a new bolt, drilled a small hole in the end, jammed a wire in it, fished the wire down through from the top, dragged it out from under mower, (now is when I jammed the wire into the little hole in the bolt). I jiggled & pulled & finally got the bolt up through the frame & gearbox & got a nut & lockwasher on it. Then I boogered up the exposed threads to prevent this from happening again, still good after 20 + years.

 

90 is probably going to be a little too hot for 3/32" 6011, 75 I think is the next lowest on an AC225 but may be a little cold. I would try 90 but if it just doesn't want to weld right go down to the 75, you might have to hold a little longer arc than usual to get the heat you need.

 

If I could do it at 75 amps,I could use my mig welder using fluxcore wire.It has 5 volt settings and if I turn the welder up to 4 or 5 it trips the breaker.And on 3 it just seems like it doesn't put the heat in the piece of metal you are welding on.Not much good at stick welding,I can stick it together and have a solid weld,but it ain't pretty.I get better as the welding rod gets shorter if that makes any sense.I just have a 15 amp service to the garage.One of these days I'm going to get about 130 feet of 10/2 wire run to the garage so I can max out my mig welder.It needs a 20 amp dedicated circuit.
Like Walkerweld said,get the angle grinder and groove the cracks a little before welding.

 

Take a new rod and cut it in half, I do that sometimes. Grind or wire brush the flux off the other piece and you have 2 7" rods.

 

Thats a good idea.

 

dugndeep, you have a Lincoln 225. Does the outlet socket you plug it into have 3 wires or 4 wires feeding it? Or, in other words, does the male plug on the Lincoln's cord have 3 prongs or 4 prongs?
Probably has 3, but if by chance it has 4, you can make up a "temporary" adapter that will enable you to use your 110 volt wire welder until you someday get that 30 amp dedicated circuit.
But the adapter is not "feasible" to use unless the 220 volt circuit you have now has 4 wires serving it.

 

Walkerweld,I have a building outback that I keep the Lincoln 225 in,it also has my washing machine ,dryer,deep freeze and alot of other things that I have no room for any where else.I wheel the Lincoln out on that little slab of concrete at the door and use a 8-4 extension cord to plug the Lincoln up to the dryer outlet.It's only a 3 prong outlet.

 

Well, dang. A 3 wire 220 circuit cannot be utilized to derive a 110 outlet in a safe manner. The problem lies in the fact that a 3 wire 220 circuit has only 2 phase wires and the equipment grounding wire. 3 wire 220 circuits are intended for applications wherein all the circuitry in the appliance are strictly 220 volt (all internal wiring runs just between the 2 phase wires) without any derived 110 circuits. Some people might say that you can use the bare equipment grounding wire instead of the required insulated neutral wire (that is present in a 4 wire 220 circuit), but don't do it. Using the bare ground wire as a current carrying conductor means that in the event of a ground fault condition, the metal exterior parts of the appliance will be electrified, and if someone touches the metal exterior, they could get a dangerous shock.
The overhead triplex feeder to your out building makes it perfectly clear that there are only 2 phase wires and a ground going to that structure. Not the best way it could have/should have been done. Because I see an outside light, and I'm guessing there are inside lights as well, and maybe a 110 wall plug or two.....................I hope the lights and plugs are powered independently by their own dedicated branch circuits (run underground?) from the house panel, and not simply derived circuits off of that triplex feeder.

 

Well, dang. A 3 wire 220 circuit cannot be utilized to derive a 110 outlet in a safe manner....

Are you saying that the fan in a 3 wire 220 buzz box is a 220 volt fan?

 

I would use the stick and try around 75 or 90. The 6011 will do a better job on rusty metal. I did repairs on one too in the same locations.

I added some runners on the bottom front . Ran it from bottom up and followed angle to the top of deck. The original metal was pretty thin from ground contact.

 

walkerweld, maybe that bare wire overhead is the "Neutral" with a distribution panel inside the building with its own ground stake?
I used to rent a Garage that was wired like that, with its own breaker panel and Ground rod.

 

x2!
Take a look at the wire between the pole and any residence. Two hots and a ground.

Inside the house's panel, ground and neutral are exactly equal.

The ground wires inside the house are separate from neutral for safety in and about the house. Once we get on the transformer side of the panel, all bets are off!

 

In the main panel (first panel after the electric meter) the neutral bar and the ground bar are both bonded to the panel chassis. A circuit that is run from a main panel to another panel downstream is called a feeder. The downstream panel is the feeder panel (aka sub panel). For a 220 volt, single phase feeder, the cable that comprises the feeder circuit must have 2 insulated phase wires, an insulated neutral wire, and a ground wire (ground may have green insulation or can be bare wire). Inside the feeder panel, the neutral bar must be insulated from the panel chassis but the ground bar must be bonded to the panel chassis.
You can't fabricate a feeder circuit using 2 insulated phase wires and a bare ground if there are to be any 110 volt branch circuits derived from the feeder panel. If all branch circuits leading out of the feeder panel are 220, then a 3 wire feeder cable is OK. And as to driving a separate ground rod for the location of the feeder panel, nope, you can't have another grounding rod unless approved by the local inspector, and the ground wire leading from the main panel to the feeder panel and on to the secondary grounding rod must be of the same AWG wire size and ampacity.
See the schematic for my Lincoln 125/225. Red arrow indicates the ON/OFF switch. Fan and transformer feed directly off of the switch. The switch opens both phase wires. Ground wire goes straight to the welder chassis.

 

I don't like messing with electricity especially 220,usually don't come back from that if something goes wrong.I'll just roll the Lincoln out and weld the bushhog up.That's the thing about welding out in front of the out building,you have no way to hold stuff except to do it on the ground.The bush hog is a different story being it's attached to the tractor but I mean smaller thing's that really need more amps than say my Maxus 125 can put out.That's the main reason I wanted a 110 volt welder for the garage,you would have somewhere and a vice to hold stuff.I'll get that 30 amp service run to the garage one day,well I reckon it won't be 30 amps considering the 100 plus feet I'll have to run to get there.

 

While I had it out in front of the barn I figured I would go ahead and fill up the gear box with some new oil.It holds exactly 1 quart.Well I did that and something come up and had to run to town and when I got back out to the barn about 4 hours later you can probably guess what I saw,about 1 quart of 85W/140 gear oil on the ground.A fescue seed or something has got up in the seal or it's just dry rotted where it has set outside the barn for over a year and a half because I didn't use it at all last year.I'll either have to replace the seal,big job considering having to borrow the tools to do it(blade nuts require a 1-11/16" socket and blade pan requires a 1-1/2" socket).I have a 1/2" drive,1-1/2" socket which I could use to take the pan with blades attached off(just have to put boom on tractor and turn bush hog upside down).I'm going to try what the John Deere mechanic suggested first before I go to turning it upside down and taking the pan off.He suggested putting John Deere Corn Head grease in the gear box.It's a grease that stays solid then liquifies with movement and then goes back to solid with no movement.I had read comments from other websites about using corn head grease in bush hogs and they were all positive,one guy said he put it in there 10 years ago and has had no problem with his gear box on his bush hog.So I went and bought 3 tubes,just $3.75 a tube and put it in there and mowed just a little around the barn,started raining is why I quit so I didn't get to check out to see if any come out.Gear box is quiet,can't hear it at all over tractor motor just the whirring of the bush hog blades.I did weld on the corner of the bush hog that has the least damage to to see what setting's I can use,like I said earlier,not good at stick welding at all.A good experienced stick welder could make it look like it's ready for paint.I wish I could just use my mig welder,would be perfect for the amp setting's it has.I just welded the one corner,4th pic above in previous post to to see what it would do.More concerned about taking care of gear box at the moment.

 

After looking at the first weld pic above,just noticed that the crack runs the full length of the weld down the outside.See the crack starting at the bottom and running up into the weld I made.There's alot of sloppy weld's on this thing that come from the factory.