Fusion Message Board

In this space, visitors are invited to post any comments, questions, or skeptical observations about Philo T. Farnsworth's contributions to the field of Nuclear Fusion research.

Subject: Spot Welder
Date: Jun 05, 11:16 am
Poster: Richard Hull

On Jun 05, 11:16 am, Richard Hull wrote:

All

Antoher hamfest weekend is past me now and more booty came my way. I had fashioned a crude spot welder of sorts out of a 5 volt 100 amp filament transformer. It worked to close grid circles and reduce the reliance on silver soldering related to grid construction.

Internal grid geodesic construction is always a boring, odeous and tedious task. Spot welding speeds that task up.

I was finishing up at the fest on Sunday and on my way back to the truck, saw a pile of things in the grass with the scribbled sign "FREE STUPH". In that pile was a somewhat battered Raytheon tube element production spot welder! It weighs about 120 lbs, and I chugged it out to the truck on my dolly. It is vacuum tube based, but has several ranges of weld discharge capacitance selectable on the front dial. It looks like late 50s early 60s technology, but at free, it was priced right and I will be cleaning and servicing it back to life. I will, hopefully, have a nice professional spot welder made specifically for small tube element assembly.

It pays to pay attention to even hamfest junk piles!

Richard Hull