Adventures in a BIG old country mansion

The real, paid work crew is tearing out all the interior walls in the entire house that are exposed to the outside so they can apply sufficient blown in closed cell insulation.

They started on the kitchen yesterday and today. And didn’t cover/tape off my stove project. Now it’s literally covered in a thick layer of dust from tearing out all the plaster and lathe.

I could really scream today. Oh well, at least the first layer of stove paint was completely dry.

 

Can't like that!

 

I’m in the process of building my spot welder from an old 1200 watt microwave oven transformer. The original transformer was a high voltage, low amperage unit. It had a primary coil of a couple hundred wraps of copper wire, and a secondary coil of thousands of wraps of very thin copper wire wrapped around the armature. I had to remove the secondary coil and rewind it with 2 gauge wire so now it’s very low voltage (1-2 volts) but very high amperage (800-900 amps) and it’s enough to melt steel. So I’ll run the two heavy wires to two opposing copper electrodes on the ends of the long 2”x2” arms.

When you put two layers of sheet metal together between the electrodes and push the power button for a second or two, it welds the metal together in a spot about the size of a pencil eraser. So that’s how I’m going to seal up my stainless metal boxes to line the ovens in the antique cook stove to keep the flue gases/smoke out of the ovens.

 

You rock!
I really admire people like you who can make stuff happen.

 

Just be really careful about what you are doing. We don't want to hear about any ambulance rides for you.

 

or helicopters...

 

I took it to a friend’s last night who has a lot of experience with electric work, to have him double check all my wiring and make sure all the circuits are continuous with his multimeter. Everything checked out, so we plugged it in and he checked the voltage output. It’s putting out about 2 volts so by the math, amperage should (?) be in the 700-800 amp range, enough to melt steel and make some decent spot welds.

Because it’s ultra low voltage, you can touch both electrodes and turn it on and not be harmed. One of the YouTube video makers does just that in his video (but strongly states NO ONE should try that at home!)

 

Correct me if I'm wrong BrianK but I thought it was the amps that were dangerous...

 

In relative terms, yes, but in this case the voltage isn’t high enough to create an arc from one hand, through the body, to the other hand, so no circuit is created/completed. (I’m not very knowledgeable about electric circuits so I may be wrong!)

 

Yeah that's basically right, but if you had wet hands/feet, all bets are off.
0.1 amps can stop your heart, but it takes a little more voltage to drive it...the higher the voltage, the less amps it takes to kill you...and vice versa, to a point anyways...there are a lot of variables with getting shocked and living vs dyeing from it.

 

I finished refurbishing some of the final stove parts and started bending stainless sheet metal for the oven box liners tonight.

 

Making these stainless oven boxes was a lot more of a challenge than I bargained for. I’m about at the max end of my meager metal working skills/experience and they aren’t spot welded yet.

 

The cutting and bending is complete, thankfully. Now I have to try out my spot welder tomorrow and seal the boxes up.

 

They look really great. I hope your spot welder does the job!

 

Thanks! Here’s the type of original oven liner they’ll be replacing:

 

Will you try to replicate the rack supports on the insides?

 

Yes, but only one, not two. I built the boxes out of 24g stainless but I have a piece of 18g to build the rack supports.

These boxes I made aren’t as tall as those pictured above. More like this one:

 

The diy spot welder actually works!!!
I can't tear the weld apart, even with pliers.

 

Fantastic! Now do it 500 times...