A long, long time ago... in a galaxy far, far away...
...Been dere, dunnat, got the shirt full of pinhole burns already. More like $300 when I did it ~15 years ago at Horror Fraught. 
I'm looking at this one as both a quick & dirty stick welder to get by with until my HFT MIG is back where it belongs, and as a future TIG power source for when I need to do fine work on SS/AL.
mnem
*tzzzzzzlllllzzzzzzllllzzzzzt* 
Whatever dude. You can armchair QB this one all you want. I know about aluminum and the speed with which it oxidizes; and that you need to use a SS brush. Even between changing work angles on the work. And you really wanna store that brush so it doesn't get contaminated by other crap in the shop, too. They make rod for stick welding aluminum, and you can also use it as filler for DC TIG as long as the metal is thin enough. 
I know it's the wrong way to do it, and gets no penetration; hence sheet metal and tube. Again... you're talking CAN'T vs best practice.
I don't like to stick weld with a coathanger either but I assure you it CAN be done, as I've done it when I had to. Not pretty, but welded nonetheless.
For fuck's SAKE man.
None of this REALLY matters... even if I CAN'T do aluminum with that little buzzbox I can still do ferrous; both stick and TIG. I could even do AL MIG with it if I wanted to spend the money on a spoolgun. There are plenty of applications here; $50 is nothing to throw at it. I spent more than that on pizza & wings for lunch.
mnem
Y'know Mnem. It would be nice if just once in a while you admitted that you don't know everything about all things mechanical and admit that sometimes you've got it wrong. All this flows from me pointing out that it was a DC only box, and that's not suitable for TIG welding Aluminium. Anyone who knew their way around TIG would have gone "Good catch, thanks".
You however, seem to blow up like this every time someone brings up something that points out the limits of your knowledge and you start getting squirrelly and argumentative. On this one, everything I have ever learned about this from the guys who do it for a living, and from the guys who do it for a hobby, and from my welding textbooks says you're wrong. Nothing says it with as much clarity as much as that screen grab of a DCEN weld in Aluminium. That one could bodge it, or even weld with a coathanger is just distraction. It's not a question of "best practice" versus "the possible", it wasn't even a question until you made it one because all the rest of the world says "AC for TIG welding on Aluminium" and for some reason you choose to disagree with the rest of the world.
That you have held a welding torch and used it a few times does not make you the expert who's competent to disagree with all the acknowledged expertise from the field, and does not excuse you from accusing someone of being an "armchair QB" because they disagree with you based on that pool of knowledge. Not that it counts for anything, but I suspect that I made my first weld before you were born (MMA on angle iron, frame for the two Villiers 2 stroke motors from two scrapped 'invalid carriages*' for a hovercraft that I was building with my father, circa 1970).
Soooo... looking over the exchange over my morning cuppa... yeah, it does look like I made a ass of myself.
I'll cop to that. However, it's really not that simple either; it isn't exactly the way you describe here.
You didn't say
"Hey, that's a DC only box; most of the time, low-frequency AC is better for aluminum." Maybe that's what you were THINKING... and maybe you really meant it that way... but what you said/did was to pick one word out of a list of possible uses in my post (aluminum wasn't even my primary intent... just one thing I'd done with DC TIG, way back when in the used-ta was), then go into a long, one-sided technical discussion that sounded for all the world like
"You CAN'T".
I'm not going to claim that I've never pontificated... Ifni's sake, I know the exact opposite.
I LOVE to pontificate. It's a nerd THING.
So okay... I misunderstood what you were getting at... but then again, you didn't say it like
"Hey; maybe you did this once upon a time, but it's like the worst way possible to get it done..." "casual banter with a buddy" conversation either.
From here, it looked like you were picking ONE NIT and just going off on it; saying you can't use it for that. A nit that wasn't EVEN mostly what I was into that little box for.
The point I'm getting at here is... as with most misunderstandings, there's
"D'OH!" enough to go around.
mnem
*Proffers bottle of apricot brandy as a token of peace*
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Topic: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread (Read 14901752 times)