256 a bit of trouble

[ducksface]

OK, almost exactly 30 days later, all is well.
Here's how it went;
Ray, Mike Alex and Oleg all worked on this for me.
I opened the unit and it was obvious what was smoking; It was residue on a HUGE resistor [like Mallory used to issue with their coils] and was really no big deal.
The buzzing was the points going wild the moment I turned on the unit. With a bit of tracking we found what we think is the problem; a tiny standard 12volt relay seems to have welded its contacts together. This causes the machine to Always be on. The torch would be on no matter what, the points roared at about 30 cycle a second, and the damn thing tig'd just fine. Once the arc caught the points would close and all was well. Break away, and the points would rattle.
You better have a grip on the plasma torch when you turned on the machine; machine-gun points then wham, it came on no matter what you were doing.

All because of a standard little bitty relay. Relay is right on top, in the center of the top board. I could whack it with a screwdriver, but the soldering on those boards is far too good for me to R&R it.

So;

Every time I emailed about a previous convewrsation someone called me within 3 minutes. They embarrassed me with such good service. A bazillion parts in a 256, I wasn't even angry that this stupid relay welded itself together.
Mike called me about midnight his time, Ray was always there, Alex called just to see what was up. Every one of them offered me all they could, except for a different welder. No 256 available and all on the boat are spoken for.
So... Oleg finds a way. Someone on the other end of the world is swapping his new 256 for separate units. Swap guy [thanks to him and Crystal for getting this done] ships me his unit, which has been fully tested and ran and actually used to ensure it works, and I mailed mine to the service center.

What a difference in machines.

All is well, Oleg is treating me right on a cooler [so is Mike and Alex. I need to work them seperately, together 8-)], they're reimbursing me for the shipping [I had a FedEx account so I just took the bull by the horns and got it handled], swap guy gets what he wants, I got what I wanted.

From what I read on the forum I guess I got the only bad one out of the shipment. I'm happy overall, and will buy my MIG from them when it's time.

You'd think since I had a month to just hang around I'd have projects cut and fitted. I haven't done squat.