So I had to take a step back, disconnect the pedal control, and through trial and error find a way to adapt the Chinese welder to my task. I spent some time poking around the Internet and learned a lot from this a most excellent thread on Race-Dezert.com, authored by one of the Gods of Fabrication. Based on some tips I gleaned from this thread, I switched to the smallest electrode (1 mm) and the smallest filler rod (1.6 mm) that I have. I turned the pulse rate way up to approximately the max of 300 Hertz, although it’s hard to say since there’s no readout, adjusted the pulse duty cycle to 50% and the “basic” current to 50%. At the higher pulse rate the digital readout gives an approximation of the average current instead of continuously changing semi-random numbers within the range like you see at the lower rates. When I nudged this averaged reading up from 60 to 65 Amps, things finally came together.