"whit3rd" wrote in message
...
On Wednesday, March 25, 2015 at 8:57:04 AM UTC-7, wrote:

I have a couple of these type of soldering guns. I need to have a
repeatable process because I want to make lots of parts. So what if I
use one of these guns with a diode in series?

Don't do that. The low resistance of the tip is the reason the
transformer
type gun gets away with a small core, and if you raise the resistance (or
put a diode in) it'll just saturate and blow a fuse.

The diode would not likely pass the 200A or so of current that the
gun tip operates with.

A long time ago, I fooled with lasers and their power supplies because they
were the future. Until I melted a penny in the fuse box at Dad's.

Diodes able to handle the abuse I was giving were very expensive. Finally,
a guy wrote an article (~1965-66-67)on holograms in Scientific American.
He made a power supply that had a synchronous motor twirling a rotary switch
to(full wave)rectify the AC from a center tapped neon sign transformer. I
made one from his discussion and it worked great. No core saturation anymore
because the switching time was so fast - I think about 3600 rpm.
I just now went to the basement to dig in the archives (never throw anything
away) to see if I could find the copy of the magazine. I know I have it.
But where? Probably at Mom's. The power supply might be there too. If
you're interested, I'll keep looking.

Steve