Well yes, there was a ton of “magic smoke” out of the machine, but that did not lessen the fun. The secondary of one of the transformers cooked and needs to be replaced. I’m looking into replacing it with enameled solid profile wire. Plus, as I found out, the spacing need not be tight in MOT (Microwave Oven Transformer) conditions. Meaning that I will leave some space between the MOT face and the winding loop to provide better cooling. Fixing the wires in place is good practice, because otherwise the wires will physically jump around the core, yielding losses and unnecessary noise. Enameled wire will also be better at giving away its heat, since there is less material for the heat to penetrate (compare to the insulation). There will be a upgraded forced air cooling system with better airflow regulation. I’m not sure about ballasting the thing. Magnetic shunts in the MOT cores seem to give pretty stable arc. Once arced, I could pretty much weld a whole rod. There should be a fail solution though, when you forget yourself to the fun of welding “very important metal pieces to other very important metal pieces” and forgetting that the coils might burst into flames any moment. As for usage on the ship, I’m thinking there is plenty of welding to be done once we get to building the deck and rigging.
Here you see some very important metal pieces welded together. To the right are some more or less decent welds. The rest you see is sputter. It all holds together though, I gave this unification of metal a good hammering and all I got were dents. Shall I sell it on Ebay?
