On Saturday, August 15, 2015 at 6:00:47 PM UTC-4, Pete Keillor wrote:



I'd still need to build the carriage, stepper drive, controls, etc. I
have a Beaglebone Black which could be applied to that job. I can get
a reasonable stepper for $11 from the salvage place in town, plus some
linear bearings and a bellows coupler for not much.

Any known reasons the welder is a bad idea?

Thanks.


There are some DIY edm plans on the internet. You might look at some of them for ideas.

Many years ago, somewhere around 1969 a friend and I kludged up a edm. We used his drill press for the feed by setting the depth nuts and then leaned on the handle to feed the tool a very small amount. As I remember we used a good sized maybe 500 VA transformer and I think a voltage doubler. A light bulb in series with the supply had low resistanece when things were working and a higher resistance when we had the tool shorting to the work. A kludge , but it worked and we could put square holes into tool steel.

We were charging the cap to about 300 volts. So a bunch higher voltage than your welder would supply, but the plans on the internet all use lower voltage.
So in answer to your qoestion , I do not know.

Dan