Took the first step towards building my shop

[Crusty]

FWIW - I bought a Lotos TIG200 TIG/MMA welder for around $550 on Ebay and I'm happy with it once I reworked the foot pedal to operate the way that I like. They're sold by Home Depot online but you can save about $100 by buying on Ebay. TIG welding is a challenging skill yet to be learned but it's doing a nice job with stick and the next thing I'm going to do is add a switch to my stinger handle so that I can use HF start when stick welding because it's so much easier than contact starting. They also sell several other welders in different configurations (there's a combo welder/plasma cutter that's calling me) and you may find a model that fills your basic needs at an affordable price and I'd expect the quality to be similar.