Hi everyone,

I open this topic about how to make an electric arc furnace because I am really interesting to build one by myself.

To sum up my situation, I have already make a simple circuit : two electrodes are connected in serie with an electric kettle, powered by the main 230 volts. The kettle allows to limit the current, to avoid any risk of short-circuit. At the beginning, I used to use carbon electrodes extracted from salted batteries. It works pretty well but nowadays, such batteries are very difficult to find in my country. In that respect, I would like to use iron electrodes (nails, screws,...) instead of carbon. I have done several tries with iron electrodes but for the moment, I can't make and stabilize electric arcs : I can only get some sparks.

I have seen several videos on YouTube : some people seems to be able to make stable electric arcs between iron parts :





I think this is exactly what I am looking for and I would like to apply this for my electric arc furnace. According to what I saw, the current needs to be constant (DC) and a coil needs to be placed to ease the electric arcs formation. I tried to contact the authors of these videos but I can't get very precise informations. Moreover, I try to make a coil by myself : I winded 50 turns of an electric wire around a 10mm diameter iron screw, then I added a diode bridge to rectify the signal from the main.

However, that didn't work. Therefore, I would like to contact you, to try to understand where I am getting wrong in my setup, and what can I do to achieve this purpose.

Postscript: sorry if my english is not perfect, actually I'm french but I will try to do my best !

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