Shop Notes 4/4 - High voltage tinkering and baby-steps to a 3kw Tesla Coil power supply.

Not much progress for any single goal today, more like tiny steps for 2-3 related projects.

Grabbed this high-power dummy load and a couple other bits from the local HAM radio shop.  Basically just a big precision heating element (resistor) inside a paint can.

It's rated 1-2kw but I'm hoping it will hit 3kw for a brief time without melting down.

Got this relatively cheap 3,000 watt DC power supplies for one of the HAM radio amplifier projects (Tesla Coil experiments).

Needed a minor 'hack' manually shorting a few pins to force it to power on without being in a Blade Server rack, but so far so good.  Needs 240v but thankfully I have one 240v plug in the shop for the welder/CNC mill.

Here's the amplifier and a smaller power supply I'm sizing up in a rackmount project case.  Just waiting on a heat sink and copper heat spreader then I should be ready to finish assembling and test it out.

The other parallel project I've been working on is a tube-based amplifier.  Here I'm testing a pair of microwave oven transformers to see how they perform before I proceed further.  Mildly underwhelming result, though I might just drudge forward and see how it performs as an actual vacuum tube supply.