Right on, good thread. I once saw a guy use a car battery to weld an alternator bracket that had broken off the lug where it mounted to the engine block. This was in a jeep and we were off-roading umpteen miles out in the middle of BFE in the Calif desert. The bracket had broken and the weight of the alt was causing it to hang just enough sideways to cause it to get into the fan. He used jumper cables as the welding leads and some baling wire as the electrode and kind of looked away as he struck the arc. Obviously this was in an old jeep that did not have a PCM or anything electronic. When you're off-road and stuff breaks, you get pretty creative... It wasn't pretty but it dang sure worked. I had always heard that you could use a battery to weld with but had never actually seen it done.