Recent content by ferball

I built a toroidal coil by wrapping galvanized electric fencing around a soup can. It comes out to about a 3 inch circle that is about 5/8 of an inch thick by a little less than an inch wide. I put about a thousand turns of 30gauge magnet wire for the primary coil, it gets a little warm, but...

Was an obvious one, just checking myself and showing my ignorance.

Now is that series wiring for both the secondary and primary windings?

Here is another thought I had today regarding my DIY welder and it might be easier to do from a design perspective. What if I made like six small transformers then wired them to together, it would allow scalability and some adjustment, by adding or removing a transformer from the circuit. What...

Ambitious...maybe but I don't think so, Arc welding technology is a hundred years old, and I am not looking to make a super deluxe ultra efficient transformer, just something that will take a 110v ac current on a 15 amp breaker and get maybe 60 amps and 20 volts out without popping the breaker...

I am thinking of possibly using "garden wire" which is an insulated steel wire for the core. This should reduce the eddy currents, but I do realize that steel will have some loss due to hysteris. Also my understanding is that a shunt should limit the output current, and a movable shunt will...

I built a welder using Microwave oven transformers, but I keep melting the secondary coil, and they are a pain to rewrap. So I was thinking about building a transformer from scratch using available materials. My first obstacle is the core material, I know laminated core material is...