"Don Foreman" wrote in message
...
| On Mon, 17 Jan 2005 22:27:13 -0500, RWL
| wrote:
|
| Hmmm. How do you make a High Freqeuency generator? Are there plans
| somewhere in the dropbox or on the web? Would my stick welder benefit
| to make my starts easier? (to rephrase that.... would it be easier
| for me to start a bead without sticking the rod or getting it started
| through dirt / paint with an external HF unit?)
|
| The Lincoln and Century accessory HF boxes are (or were) essentially
| a ferro-resonant transformer delivering about 8000 volts to a spark
| gap thru the primary of a fairly large (6" dia) air-core coil. This
| is actually a stepdown xfmr; the secondary is a couple of turns of
| copper strap delivering about 2KV at HF. I think there was a cap in
| there too. Note: these things generate a LOT of radio-frequency
| interference. They're legal, but they can make you unpopular.

I read that neon transformers are popular with the Tesla crowd, and I
have read that solid state neon transformers use actual high frequency to
create the high voltage, and they don't bleed on the AM radio band quite as
bad. With a spark gap, can this work directly as a source? If there were a
large, low inductance coil (like a coil of heavy solid wire) after the
rectifier and before the spark gap, wouldn't that keep most of the HF out of
the rectifier? I was working on trying to figure out what a good inductance
was, but the size and practical aspects make it pretty hard to nail down
actual figures on the inductor, so I'm guessing that pretty close would be
good enough.
I read about one idea on the web that had a coil of copper tubing with a
dielectric and a smaller wire, actually making a heavy current coax, with
the HF going through the center conductor and the electrode current going
through the outer tubing. This was the transformer for the HF transfer. I
imagine it would keep the radiated HF down to a minimum.
Would these ideas be worth trying to run with?