stick welding safety question?

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Sorry for the nube question but I don't want to "light" myself up or damage my machine.  I have re taken my garage and its being built into "my" shop.  I was always welding out front on a rag tag thrown together table.  I got into the habit of laying the stinger on the concrete floor. As I never know where to put it.  Well I stepped on the darn thing and broke it.  Tomorrow I'll replace it.  Anyway my first project is going to be a small but real welding table.  Instead of this scrap metal POS of a table I'm using.  Can you safely mount a bracket or hanger for a stinger on your welding table?  It's alwasy hot when the machine is on.  I don't want to weld my stinger to the table.  Secondly I was thinking about making a spot for my buzz box under the table.  Is it safe to have your welding machine in contact with the metal table you are working on?  I have 50 foot #2 cables we use for welding out front of the garage. The machine rairly gets moved so I'm not to concerned with having it on a cart. The short cables that came with the machine will be used on the table.  Plug in the long ones for welding in front or out back of the garage.  Thanks.
Reply:We regularly hook the stingers on the pipe columns in the welding booths or hang the cable over the arm. The machine gets grounded to the column or steel base at the school. The down side is when guys leave electrodes in the stingers. Then the stinger has an bad tendency to swing around at some point and the rod comes in contact with the column and flashes you. Unfortunately there's almost no other place in the booths to hang the stinger, so guys just have to get used to dumping the rods before they hang up the stingers.As far as the machine under the table, it won't hurt the machine from the weld arc. However  lots of guys like to grind on their tables and machines have a bad habit of sucking in all that metal dust and so on. That dust can be very hard on the machine and the electrical components inside. Either don't grind on your table, or put the machine elsewhere if you plan to do a lot of work..No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth! Ronald Reagan
Reply:You could make a bracket or something out of wood or a bracket that is isolated from the welding table for instance with wood.It's only electrodes that are easy to restart that will weld on the table (assuming your stinger is isolated). 7018 is pretty "safe" to just lay on the table. I don't like to do it anyway because you can never know for sure if it get's bumped.