T&L Publications

Oh that was a bummer how only cycling the power to the unit couldn't turn it on and off. I'm glad the ones I have can be turned on/off remotely by means of the AC going to the power cord.

Would there be a transmitter too .. I had some garden watering timers for drip irrigation that I tried to repurpose but forget at the moment what I tried to do.

I'm leaning back toward an idea I had earlier, maybe as more an experiment than anything. I got a variac that I couldn't use inside my place here because it had a strange defect of outgassing something very toxic feeling. But I could set it under the car hood for charging. Well, I'm thinking of open...

When I and my brothers and sister were kids we found some dumped wire. It was strange because the conductors seemingly were stranded steel. Maybe one conductor out of eight was nickel or something. That was about 50yr ago.

Regulators use amplifier circuits. I moved away from using the magnetic amplifier approach after checking into it and finding out that dynamic range is limited, especially tending to lack ability to have an idle output. The type of regulator makes a difference for providing qualities like stable out...

The way the design is so far, it has two transformers using half wave rectification, out of phase, to supply full wave charging voltage. It's more like a quasi magnetic amplifier. However, I'm also now leaning toward not really having it be a magnetic amplifier circuit but using a transformer with a...

I'm thinking of making a magnetic amplifier based battery charger. I have various 60Hz transformers that might be incorporated into it. I had ordered some pre-made chargers from China, but they never came, which I blame on the trade war.

I think I'd use a manual lookup table by reading a voltmeter and then seeing the corresponding figure on a chart. I pretty much did that when I used to measure outdoor temperature before digital thermometers became lower cost.

I used to have a low power iron that I would slip into a layered foil sleeve to make it hot. That gave me the idea the of opposite of clipping a temperature controlled one onto a heatsink that can dissipate more than the maximum output of the heater.

That's similar to what I put in a circuit when repairing an antique SCR based vehicle battery charger.

Howabout switching in or out a power resistor

The idle switch inserts or removes a diode rectifier in series with the heating element. I think that it cuts the AC voltage going to the heater in half.

An idea I have is that It's paint pigments that match what car manufacturers use.

I can't knock that since my soldering irons have been those low cost ones with the tip held in by set screws. My tips are 6 gauge copper wire. When the tips get deeply pitted I can cut new ends onto them.

I have a switch that lets my soldering iron idle at a lower temperature. It helped a lot to keep the tips from going bad as fast.