where assumptions get you

My old Hobart welder--1941 with a four cylinder Wisconsin engine--wasn't working this Spring. She was fine in the fall, but her winter nap must have taken something out of here because, while the engine fired right up, the welder gave out not a single amp of juice.

It's hard to work on this old machine because I have no information on it and no schematic to show me around. Requests on websites with forums of tinkerers and even a call out to the manufacturer provided nothing of assistance. But I wake up one morning to find an email from Canada where someone on one of the sites not only sent me a scan of old documents, he also kept looking around for other information, which is a tall order considering we're talking about a machine 50 years old that even the manufacturer has no records for.

All I needed to do was flash the exciter windings and that would re-magnetize the iron core and then the welder would crank up plenty of voltage. I'll spare you the tech details, but I kept insisting that this welder--basically a big DC generator--was self-exciting and had no separate windings. This guy kept saying that there must be an exciter and kept sending me more scans. Finally, I realized that I was wrong. Had I had my eyes open--well, really my brain open--I would have had this thing fixed right away. In reality, had it not been for someone else seeing things clearly, I'd still be staring at a welder that just makes a lot of noise but no spark.

How often do we close ourselves off from solutions or possibilities in life due to assumptions that we make and protect?