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Big steel resistor (garage door spring )
Hello fellow listers. First I would like to say that the list has
gone into some great new areas that make it all the more
fun for me, Thanks a lot guys and gals! Well, on to my story.
I was driving down the freeway here in Calif., trying to get
on another freeway so that I could get on the last freeway
that would get me home from work when I spied what looked
like a dead blackened armadillo wrapped around a bush on the
shoulder. This was in fact a large garage door spring that had
most likely fallen off a truck or something. When I saw it in it's
full length of 4.5 feet and 5 inches in dia I thought "nice resistor."
Now when I got it home it was a challenge to stretch it out to
find out the DC resistance of the thing so I found that it would
take 497 "something's" to spread each coiled loop of steel so
that it would not touch itself. I decided on glass cloth patches
of 1.5 X 1 inch cuz if it worked good it would get darn hot and
replacing 497 something's would be "bad" if they melted and
burned. As it is now the DC value is . 2 ohms. The dia of the
steel wire that forms the spring is . 340 inches. My plan is to
bolt three legs to the outside of this thing and have a fan to
blow from the bottom up and draw the heat upward into a flue
that would suck the heat upward. Now all this is to ballast a
10 KVA pig from our noble Dr.Rez. Now my question. If the
resistor is made out of steel it would be an "inductive" type
since the coil winding is as large as it is and would this be
"good" for up-ing the actual value of the ballasting yes ?
Thanks a lot.
Denis Despins
KC6TRW