Alrighty... great success today!
First off... the welder is in, assembled, and appears to work. It feeds wire anyways. I don't have a bottle or the appropriate apparel just yet, so I opted to just let it be for tonight.
I racked my brain all day trying to figure out the best way to wire myself up some convenient 220 (240 actually). My house is the worst I've ever seen for running wire. While out back pondering the issue over an after-work cold one, I remembered we've always had a weird sub-panel out there that I've never bothered to inspect. I busted out the multimeter and flipped the breaker on, and low and behold... 240!
40A breaker on the sub-panel with about an 8'/8 gauge cabled outdoor outlet box attached (with the wires just nutted off). I just grabbed a welder outlet from Lowes and screwed everything down. Someone must have had a hot tub or something back there at some point.
I need to go back to Lowes tomorrow and finish doing this right. I need to mount the cabled outlet, and outfit it with a proper outdoor cover setup. It's a hazard like it is... hehe. I flipped the breaker back off for the time being.
My first impressions of the welder should be taken with a grain of salt obviously, as I have never owned OR used one before. With that said.. this looks like a pretty badass little buzzbox for $500. Eastwood MIG 175.
The wire was simple to get going. It came with a 4" spool of ER70S-6... which I will happily use up on any metal scraps I can find. Everything seems to be of at
least decent quality. Everything feels solid. Beyond that, I'll have to add more about the welder later once I stand a chance of knowing what I'm talking about. Here are some pics of what I pulled out of the (super heavy) box.