Re: Pole Pig Ballast

To: tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
Subject: Re: Pole Pig Ballast
From: Jim Fosse <jim.fosse-at-bdt-dot-com>
Date: Wed, 29 May 1996 06:30:18 GMT

On Tue, 28 May 1996 22:29:20 -0600, Tesla List
<tesla-at-poodle.pupman-dot-com>, you wrote:


>I did try running my 5kva pole pig with no ballast - once. 
I misconected my metal-halide lamp ballasts once - pegged my 100A
meter HARD.
>
>Scott Myers and I have talked about building a variable inductor to replace
>the welder.  I believe we decided we needed a range of 5 to 25 milliheneries,
>wound with wire large enough to carry up to about 50 amps.
>
Ed,
	I've not bought a large variac yet, so I am just "dumping" the
line onto the Pig primary. When I run it with just 5 ohms of resistive
ballast, I get a few firings per second out of my rotary. As soon as I
added my "choke" (1.2mH aircore, 9.2mH ironcore) the gap firing
smoothed out all the way to 1280bps (potentially).

I think that the choke is adding just enough inductive kick, when the
spark gap quenches, to kick the pig's output voltage up enough to
start the cycle over again. That is without having to wait for a long
RC time constant.

	jim