A Homemade Spot Welder/ What’s going on? Blog #5
Spot welding is very useful in makerspaces. Whether you want to join pieces of sheet metal together to make a project box or make battery packs from existing cells, a spot welder is an awesome piece of equipment. Anton and Joshua, both recently inaugurated members, thought they would try making one themselves. Spot welders work by using heat generated by a material’s resistance to melt metal pressed between its two electrodes. Unlike other forms of welding, no material is added to join the contact points. To lower mains electricity to the correct voltage for this welder Anton and Joshua rescued two transformers from broken microwave ovens. They equipped the device with a controller board that regulates the time and the power of the weld. The welder can be controlled by a pedal, a button or a microswtich that is pressed when the electrodes contact the metal. The welder joins a long list of projects that members have contributed to the space in their spare time recently like Scott’s Home Assistant Demonstration Lab, A-Train’s Frankenstein IDEX 3D printer, and th