Voltlog #227 – Identifying Pure Nickel Strip vs Nickel Plated Steel

Welcome to a new Voltlog, if you’re a frequent viewer of my videos you’ve no doubt seen me build this spot welding machine that I use occasionally for building battery packs for my RC planes. I use this machines to create nice welding spots between nickel strips and the battery contacts. My battery packs do not exceed 20A passing through and that’s only in short bursts but there are people building higher current battery packs and so it’s important for them to be using pure nickel strips instead of nickel plated steel strips for making the links.

Voltlog #207 – Making a DIY Spot Welder From A Microwave Transformer

Welcome to a new voltlog, today I’m gonna talk about a DIY spot welder that I built, the advantages of suck a build as well as the disadvantages or the the problems I encountered. So the idea for this project started many months ago, I was actually at a local recycling center to deposit some old electronics, when I saw this microwave oven transformer sitting right there on a table, like the guy in charge of the place literally took the transformer out of a microwave oven a few hours prior to me arriving there.

So that sparked the idea in my head, I asked the guy if I can have the transformer, he said yes and that was the start.

Voltlog #189 – InTheMail

Hello everyone and welcome to a new InTheMail the series that will touch both your passion for electronics and your bank account at the same time.

We’re gonna start with this interesting looking controller type module. So we got what looks like a big switching device here that probably needs a heatsink. Well this is a beefy triac, it can do 100A and can also withstand 1000A non repetitive peaks. We’ve kinda started from the wrong side, from the output but that’s what stands out from this module. We have an opto-isolator which has a triac output driver, separating the two sides of the board. Let’s check the clearance on the back, they have something like 3mm clearance in this area. If I were to design this, I would have done it with at least 5mm, I don’t see the point of extending this ground poor so close to this track which is on the hot side.

Links for all of the items can be found in the video description on the youtube page.