According to mj :

[ ... dangers of microwave transformers ... ]

Good golly this looks like fun! There was another posting on how I only
need to be within inches of it for the volts to just jump out and
attack me.

Are these things really that lethal?

As is -- pretty close. Though I don't think that they actually
get *that* high in output voltage.

But -- once you strip off the secondary (finer wire), you should
be fine. It is that secondary which creates the high voltages. You'll
be replacing the secondary with only one or two turns, I think. And you
want *heavy* wire for those turns.

That original web page which you posted really was worrying me
about some of his techniques. And -- by the time I read to the end, I
discovered that he was having just the problems that I expected --
failures of the footswitch and the connectors which he used. He would
have been better off putting the switch which he made in series with the
*primary* of the transformer, not the secondary. I would have built the
footswitch box pretty much as he did -- but I would have run a power
cord directly into it, and put an AC outlet controlled by the switch in
the box. Then, it could be used to switch pretty much anything which
needed a footswitch, and the switch would not need to be a particularly
high-current one, either. *Certainly* -- don't use the phone plugs to
switch power line voltages.

Enjoy,
DoN.
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