Nah, it's a 220v Lincoln 180 from Lowes.
I stick to the standard "pause and whip" sort of technique for most beads. As far as tricks go, probably trigger welding honestly. In hard to reach/awkward areas, I decided I'm better off with quality trigger welds than shitty beads. Welding hood delay on the minimum setting, and I use it for timing of the tacks/trigger welds. I shoot for ~50% overlap, previous weld is still very hot, and easily re-melts into the new puddle forming next to it. That way you're getting more of a pulse-MIG effect than a continuous string of cold joints.
Edit: Oh, and LIGHT. Once I started blasting the hell out of my work piece with light instead of relying on the arc to illuminate things, my welding improved significantly. With just the arc (and normal garage lights) lighting the area, I couldn't see anything more than 1/4" away from the puddle while welding. This led to shitty zig-zag weld beads since I couldn't clearly tell where I was going.
It turns out you can weld a lot better when you aren't trying to do it blind.
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