TU56/TC11 restoration - VARIAC question

Very true. There's a reason railgun power supplies tend to be capacitor banks which are slowly charged and very quickly discharged. (Railguns, at least conventional railguns, demand very high current for a very short time - mega-amps for milliseconds.) Right. There's a reason high-power computer supplies have labels showing slashed-circle "no!" signs over watches and rings: they are entirely capable of turning a metallic object like a ring or watch red-hot right on your hand. If you're really unlucky, it can simultaneously spot-weld it to whatever it touched and fail to overload trip (.1 ohm contact resistance at 5 volts draws only 250 watts, which is not that much to an even moderately beefy computer power supply). I once deliberately tripped a mains breaker by shorting hot to ground with a screwdriver. It made an impressive crack! sound, and even more impressive was that the screwdriver shaft was vaporized half through - probably a couple of grams of steel gone. Not something I'm going to repeat; it gave me a good deal more respect for such things. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B