Buddah,
I'm like yersel, a bit long in the toof (if I had any) and I recently bought mesel a welderer thingy.
Seriously though, hunt through you tube and such for welding hints and tips and BUY YOURSELF A GOOD QUALITY AUTOMATIC MASK, good tough gauntlets, a few g-clamps and/or mole grip clamps for holding stuf.
The mask makes such a huge difference to you when you are starting to learn because you can see what you are doing before the arc starts!
As JM said above, get some scrap bits of metal and practice. Use a grinder to make sure anything you are gonna weld is clean, the weld area as well as the bit you clip the ground clamp onto. Then play at practicing in your own time as you experiment with current settings and wire speed. It's so much fun as you see your welds improve from hedgehogs and pincushions to lumpy and bumpy to nice and neat.
Then decide on an easy project and have a go at it. My first project was to make myself a metal workbench for welding etc. mostly made from scrap stainless steel and some chequered plate salvaged from the skip at work. The chequered plate wasn't welded as I found welding ally very difficult as the wire kept jamming. I considered buying a special powered ally torch, but they are priced away above anything I'd ever require. I did come across a good tip for ally though, if using a normal type of torch, use a nipple that's oversize compared to the wire as it runs more freely.
Most of all, have fun.
