Originally Posted by Torchhead  A good engineer knows when to stop designing. The simplest circuit that does the job and is the most reliable wins out over elegance. |
Engineers do not necessarily make good designers, too tied up with worrying about the ins and outs of HOW to make it. A good designer simply puts in everything he wants, the engineer then has to try and get him to compromise for what can reasonably be made
If I took over the connection to the torch tip, applied some capacitance and charged it 50-100 volts before starting the descent to look for metal, a sudden drop in volts would indicate that I had found it. The dialectric would be either rust or guck on the sheet to be cut. I just need a few volts to cut through that guck.
The problem is where does the wire go inside the cutter? Presumably the cutting current goes to the inside electrode. The other cable must be for the initiator spark. I think the initiator sparks to the central electrode to ionise the air coming out the tip. Everything I read is a bit vague on initiator sparks, probably because thee are different ways of doing it
I need to know what goes down that wire that connects to the outer electrode.