kenh3497

I know this has been beat to death, but I just want someone to agree I have my facts and figures strait

I have an old 6 or 12 volt batter charger capable of 4 amps. It may be 4 amps at six volts and 2 amps at 12 volts??? The primary side is center tapped for the dual voltage. Hooked directly to my cutting wire the internal circuit breaker trips after about 6 seconds or so. My feeling is a light dimmer will allow me to dial down the amperage to prevent this from happening. I may need to change wire also. If this fails I have a 24 volt 56 VA (2.3 amps??) transformer with a center tap that may also fill the bill.

Am I on the right track on this? Any benefit to rectifying the 24 volt transformer to DC for foam cutting? My former power supply gave up the ghost[]

Thanks!!

Ken

cutaway

Modern commonly available dimmer switches use a device called a triac which chops the duty cycle of standard 60hz house current. They don't operate anything like the old school rheostat. IOW, they they don't reduce current or voltage in the usual sense, rather they shape what was a sine wave into short voltage spikes with an elongated long delay between the spikes. I don't even know if they'd work properly in a DC environment.

kenh3497

The dimmer will be on the primary side of the transformer, so will only see AC voltage/current.

EDIT;

My 24 volt transformer turned out to be a 230 volt primary. So I'm back to square one with my original 4 amp battery charger.

I hooked up a light dimmer last night and gave it a go. I also stuck an amp meter in line to see what was going on. Full bore was a 9 amp draw[X(] No wonder the breaker was tripping!. Dialed back to 5 amps, it would hold for about 60 seconds, but the wire is to cold for a good cut. I'm using wire from an ice machine cube cutter. I've had it for years and it worked fine with my old power supply. Off to find new wire today.