I am it is too far him to swim too.
Boy I never had that much problems learning ACE/OX welding and cutting but of course I started out soldering for electronic repairs so it was easy to get my act together rather quickly as I went the welding tins and heavier metals. I can weld some very small parts using it. Now I do have Gas/Gasless wire welder that I use quite a bit too. It mainly because the welding rods for ACE/OX are nearly impossible to get now. Leaving the ACE on while hunting a sparker or lighter can be very dangerous plus ACE is nasty to breathe as it can take your breath away.
Even the gasless welding method requires getting the correct flux core wire. The welding store I brought the welder kept selling me poor quality flux core wire. I finally got a good spool that works great with my setup. Before that I was just about to throw out the welder and stick with the ACE/OX welding. I mean the welds looked horrible at the best. Now with the correct wire they nearly look as good as the machine welds. When welding rusted metals it is challenging even for the experience welder as you will get burn through quite easily.
I want to learn TIG welding so I can do aluminum welds. I just got the welder and the expensive CO2/Argon Tank before I can start teaching myself. Supposedly I can also use a gas type wire welder but I would need more amperage than my current welder has available.
As for the 2 cycles there are oils designed to allow up to 200:1 mix but they are expensive. Here I use a ProMix oil that is synthetic so it can be mixed at 50:1 and can be use in anything that needs from 16:1 to 50:1 but would not push past their recommend limits. A lot of the older 2 cycles can safely run 50:1 synthetic oils but I am not risking a customer machine by going beyond this. This is because the older oils were not as good at lubing things as the synthetics and they tend burn up quite rapidly too requiring to be present to keeps lubed. This summer I load out my gas leaf blower to a customer to only have it come back fried. I had used it for 5 years without problems; now it is in the recycle bin with a melted piston. The customer said he used the same fuel mix as he does for his Stihl blower that I was working on. Strange as they used the same mix ratios. To me he straight gassed it.
