I'm going to build an arc welder for around the house stuff. The recipe you see all over the net is to hook up a bunch of old microwave oven transformers, modifying them to step-down. The rewinding on the low side looks really sloppy in the pictures--doesn't look like it needs to be particularly elegant. So I got to thinking, I don't have 10 old microwaves, I wonder if I could just make a big step down transformer to run off house current and generate a jillion or so amps. I know that's plenty of current to kill an elephant, and I plan to be scrupulously cautious about it, but here's the question: What's the difference between just using steel bars for the core versus the laminated plates that they use to manufacture a real one?
Emily
Emily
