Wire Welder Project. August 2013.
Cost: Under a fiver + old Jessops 150S flash gun + a bit of old plywood.
After playing with the Smok Terminator and lately the K1 I wanted to have a play with various resistance wicks. I have also come to the conclusion that the Protanks, (that I use a daily basis for work), needed to be wicked with res/no res wires and so started to look around at “Wire Welders”. I had already searched around for ready made wires and the choice is limited and impossible to get what I wanted. Not much luck with ready made wire welders so I started to search the net.
I found a couple of videos on YouTube of homemade stuff including one or two using the guts from disposable cameras. So the project began. Not with a disposable but with an old flashgun that I hadn’t used in 10 years and wouldn’t miss. The great thing about this flash gun is that it had 4 removable screws that held it together, and a battery bay for two AA batteries.
So here is how to make the “Easy Peasy” wire welder - zapper, and trust me, if I can do it anyone can make one.
Parts List. Flash Gun. (Jessops 150S) cost £0.00 (probably £2 - £3 on car boot sale)
Following parts from Technobots.
Red 4mm banana lead to crocodile clip £1.08p
2 x Black 4mm banana plugs. £1.06p
4mm 36amp banana Socket. £1.37p
4mm red terminal post. £0.43p
Toothless alligator clip. £0.90p
Misc bits of wire.
Box to house finished project. £0.00p. (some old ply wood and two nails for a hinge.
Strip flash gun and locate wires to the flash head. Some modern flash guns will have three wires to the head. Positive and negative wires we need and the spare we don’t. You only need the Positive and negative outputs from the capacitor. (Probably marked C+ and C-).
It’s best to do a temporary wiring job on the Pos and Neg wires and attached two leads with small crocodile clips ready to do some testing.
Then wire a temporary momentary switch across the “On/Off switch points and hey presto, ready to test. (I just butchered the on/off switch and used it as a temporary momentary switch)
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
Clip a suitable (one that goes up to more than the capacitors rating) multimeter across Pos and Neg connections, and press the momentary switch on and off and make sure the multimeter voltage reading goes up. Keep everything well away from making contact at this stage as your multimeter should go up to the capacity of the capacitor, in my case 300 volts.
You won’t need to go up to 300 volts as you will probably only need around 150 - 180 volts for making wires. (130 volts for .2 Kanthal and .2 no res wire)
Let the capacitor discharge itself. This will take some time, 15 to 20 minutes is possible. The brave ones might flash the two croc clips when the voltage has dropped to around 150 volts.
At this stage I tried the “welder “ and put a piece of .2 Kanthal in one croc clip and .2 no res wire in the other. Charged the “welder” to 300 volts (oh yes, love living dangerously), and brought the two together. First mistake, BIG BANG, and very little wire left in the clips. Lesson 1, start low and work upwards.
After some trial and error I got my first decent wire at around 130 volts.
I changed the croc clips for a 4mm terminal post and a toothless alligator clip to get more consistent contact with the wires. I then made better 4mm test leads for the multimeter. These worked much better.
![]()
Thats’s it, wire welder made.
Once you’ve got it working it’s just a matter of building it into a box.
I made a box from some old plywood, it’s quite a bit bigger than the tiny little “commercial” wire Zappers, but I wanted somewhere to keep the leads, no res wire and a few small packs of pre cut resistance wires. That way I can just grab the box, make and make a res/no res wire without searching through the toolbox.
![]()
![]()
I’ve played with the wire welder a few times now and can knock out a wire in a couple of minutes to exactly the resistance I want.
So if you want a wire welder for under a fiver, plus an old flash gun, trust me it’s possible.
![]()
