Ok, so I found a schematic for basically the exact power supply that I want to build. Its an old 1970's design, but in its original form, its a tank. An unregulated, some would say dirty, unbreakable, tank. I've priced components this morning from Mouser, which as luck would have it is right down the road from my house, and its only going to be a few dollars more for me to build the power circuit as oppose to buying one pre-made, especially once you figure in shipping, then the price is almost even across the board. So heres the schematic:
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The biggest problem I can see with this design is that it uses no voltage regulator and would probably have a pretty choppy sine wave on an oscilloscope. I dont have a scope to test it on, but I want as close to flat on the waves as I can get. Also, the above schematic has "U1" as the only means of varying voltage, it just seems a bit crude. Obviously its functional, but still crude.
What I wondering is, if I basically cut off the circuit between the filtering cap and the rheostat, like this:
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could I then just go in and run the VR circuit that RonV posted?
Or, since the original schematic also has the part of the circuit to power the LED lamp, could I just cut out "U1", like so:
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and finish out the circuit, just removing "U1" that way I can still run the lamp from there? Would "C2" still need to be left in, or would running "C1" and "C2" in parallel at that point be a bad idea?
Sorry for sounding like an absolute beginner here, Im sure I should know all of this stuff by now, but looking at schematics for too long and trying to comprehend them fully sometimes gives me a headache. And as my dad always said, two heads are better than one. Also, please forgive the crap-tastic MS Paint skills.