I know your pain Andrew, many years ago I had to weld the tailgate hinges back on to Dad's trailer, so I took it around to my cuz's shop to use his beaut old Lincoln arc welder. Trouble is, his hemet lens was probably as old as the welder, and I couldn't see fcuk all, so I did the "Orange County Choppers" method, and just squinted while I welded it up.
Surprisingly, that didn't work all that well, and I woke up in the middle of the night, with my eyes opening and closing entirely of their own accord (like I was possessed by Blinky Bill) and I felt like someone was trying to cauterise my eyeballs with a soldering iron. Fcuk. Luckily my mother was a trained nurse and had seen this before, so she put a wet teabag on each eye, and within an hour or so, all was good again. I've no idea what the science involved is, but it worked.
Recently I bought another MIG just for doing aluminium and stainless, with a "Spool Gun". My CIG autoshield helmet's lens filter didn't work well with the brighter pure argon flame, so I drove over to Total tools to buy some new lenses, but I wasn't 100% happy with them either. I could have bought a new adjustable auto darkening CIG helmet (@180 bucks) but declined on the basis that 180 bucks was bullsh1t.
I dropped into Aldi to buy some cider, and saw an adjustable auto darkening helmet on special for 35 bucks, so took one home, and woo-hoo, it works great. This is my third auto-darkening helmet, but the best, and incidentally, the cheapest. Cheers, Terry.