- Joined
- Jul 11, 2003
- Messages
- 3,258
Hi folks! I've been busy whipping up a Warner etcher. Wanna see? This etcher is is made made by Warner Electric, modified by me, but the idea came from Bob Warner's tutorial over at CKD.
It started life as a tension-control power unit for a printing press. Its the unit you see here to the far left on the owners manual.
I was fiddling around with this old unit and it suddenly dawned on me that all this really is is a fancy etching unit. It outputs 30VDC, and with some wiring and modifications it will also flip to 28VAC (I'm still trying to figure out why the voltage drop, but may have something to do with the fact that there is a hefty capacitor on the board).
Here's a pic of the unit itself. I engine-turned the aluminum face I added.
The rear. 14/3 power cord, and a salvaged plug.
The bottom. Notice the feet I added. They were $.79 at the hardware store.
The guts. Notice the big capacitor southeast of the transformer. This really smooths out the DC current, although I'm not sure if its really necessary for this application. The black stuff on the wires you see is liquid electrical sealer. Works gooood!
Last but not least, here is the business ends. I used banana jacks and did the solder thing to a piece of stainless. The handle is temporary and is made of two slabs of white nylon taped together.
The two marks on the steel was made by using a old piece of tee-shirt because I had no felt and was dying to see if it worked. I used some TSP for the electrolyte. The marks are kind of brown, but I'm sure with the right stuff they'll be fine.
It started life as a tension-control power unit for a printing press. Its the unit you see here to the far left on the owners manual.
I was fiddling around with this old unit and it suddenly dawned on me that all this really is is a fancy etching unit. It outputs 30VDC, and with some wiring and modifications it will also flip to 28VAC (I'm still trying to figure out why the voltage drop, but may have something to do with the fact that there is a hefty capacitor on the board).
Here's a pic of the unit itself. I engine-turned the aluminum face I added.
The rear. 14/3 power cord, and a salvaged plug.
The bottom. Notice the feet I added. They were $.79 at the hardware store.
The guts. Notice the big capacitor southeast of the transformer. This really smooths out the DC current, although I'm not sure if its really necessary for this application. The black stuff on the wires you see is liquid electrical sealer. Works gooood!
Last but not least, here is the business ends. I used banana jacks and did the solder thing to a piece of stainless. The handle is temporary and is made of two slabs of white nylon taped together.
The two marks on the steel was made by using a old piece of tee-shirt because I had no felt and was dying to see if it worked. I used some TSP for the electrolyte. The marks are kind of brown, but I'm sure with the right stuff they'll be fine.
