Electric arc welders are very simple devices. The old design ones 🙂 New design electric welders are quite complicated devices. But if you find in some trash such nice transformer:
High power transformer from big battery charger
You can connect your welding rod to the transformer secondary winding and began your welding jobs. It will be AC welder. But if you have more components, you can build more advanced DC welder. The welding with DC current is more comfortable and welded connections are much stronger and looks more professional.
Connect such schematics:
Diodes are 200A working current, capacitor- high power electrolytic, designed to give high current (the 2.5mm2 wires connecting cap are getting hot!), shunt and ampermeter (75mV voltmeter) is designed to measure high DC current, L is some very big one.
My testing welder look like this:
And here is some test weldings:
This is 200A shunt connected to the output of welder to measure output current.
Nice sparcs!:
Experiments in http://blog.vabolis.com/2006/04/24/short-circuit/ shows, that this transformer’s short circuit current is much more than 200A.
Are you kidding?! That chematic can’t produce dc! DC from AC with 2 diodes?-fail dude! 😀
Back to school Corey. Read more books. Or maybe wiki, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectifier , fu’kin second circuit of full wave rectifier.
Hello
What is the rating or do you have all the details on how to make the L coil?
– how many turns?
– diameter of the copper wire?
– diameter of coil?
I must say it turned out impressive. Congratulations on this project!
Hope to have an answer asap and start making my own working model 🙂
As project is ~7 years old, I can not tell you exact parameters of the coil. BTW, I used stock component from some old equipment (electric troley charger), so I can not tell about exact numbers.
The only real thing is, that L is as big as transformer. Diameter of the wire- to let 200A current run without any problems. L is used as reactive balast resistor (current limiter). Profesional welding transformers have current limit build in to main transformer core.
how ’bout a youtube video, please!
It certainly is back to school for Corey. And as he stated so eloquently – “fail dude!”