Shopsmith Forums

In nearly all of the discussion about electrolysis there is mention of a battery charger. I have one but, at best, it is flaky. Rather than a battery charger, can this be done with a power supply?

More specifically, I have two 5 volt 12 amp regulated dc power supplies that I have been carrying around for years. I suspect that one would not do the trick but if I connected the two in series (outputs in series) would I have a suitable source?

I am in the process of making one out of a extra computer power supply. I tried a power brick, ac -> dc converter and I blew it out. I think it was only 1 amp? It ran for a while, then died.... Here is were I am with the converted power supply:



and



There is a really good write up here

You are developing a nice looking set up. You did not state specifically but since you are responding to my post about a supply for electrolysis use I do assume that is what you are doing with this.

It was the suggestion that I might need 10amps or more at 10 volts for electrolysis that caused my question. I know that I will have 10 volts by ganging them and I assume the current capacity will remain as advertised.

My supplies are also sensing supplies (output regulated) so that might be an issue for me too.

I was checking out that same project on the instructable.com website. Love that site. Became a member about about a year ago.

I'm interested to see how yours comes out. Keep us posted for sure. Are you going to try it out for rust removal?

Sorry for not stating, little excited....I am using it for electrolysis. I am restoring my 10E that I just purchased. It think we are good with the amps, if I rember correctly it is 28amps at 12v. The nice thing is it has both 5 and 12 volts. I'll check on the amps....

I love that site too

Me and my daughter are getting ready to kick it off now on the head assembly.... I'll post pictures and update in a bit.

I did all my electrolysis with an old wall wart 9V 350mA AC->DC adapter that I salvaged from a broken phone. This included the entire jointer as well as the bandsaw table, so you don't need much current or voltage to do the trick.

-Chris

cml wrote:I did all my electrolysis with an old wall wart 9V 350mA AC->DC adapter that I salvaged from a broken phone. This included the entire jointer as well as the bandsaw table, so you don't need much current or voltage to do the trick.

-Chris

Dusty: Depending upon the size of the part(s) and the anode, and the spacing, I think one of your supplies would work. If more voltage is needed, the series arrangement should work. The sense inputs should be adequate if wired directly to each output directly. Voltage regulation is not really required.

One thing that seems prevalent in most of the 'good' descriptions, is that a lot of current is not required. After getting my funky battery charger to 'behave', good reasonably fast results were obtained with current under 5A. These are measured currents using a good quality ammeter. I did not determine the ripple content, but I have to assume it was considerable since NO filtering was used. A regulated supply should have zero ripple and therefore work better/faster.

Here is the final product, I think it worked great.

Here is a shot after we pulled it out and dried/wiped it off:



Here is another shot after 5 min of abuse with a wire wheel. I dont know if you can see, but it is down to bare metal.



If you are interested, here is a link to all the photos I took during the process:

What voltage did you use?