[TCML] Toroidal ballast considerations

[Scott Bogard <sdbogard@xxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings all,
     I've been contemplating building a toriodal ballast for my pig powered
coil to be, since I found this website, which sells toroidal cores...
http://www.alphacoredirect.com/contents/en-us/d3_toroidal_cores.html
I have a few questions though, as I've never built a proper ballast before.
 Firstly, after perusing the archives I am seeing that Gary Reynolds once
had a program written for aiding in ballast design, does that program work,
and does it still exist?  My second question is the VA ratings of the cores
on this website look kind of high for what I would expect given their size
(for 10300 VA I'm seeing a cross sectional area of 5.8 in^2, which seems
low to me) So I guess in ballast VS transformer duty what is the difference
as far as core saturation etc.  Lastly is there any reason not to use
toroidal ballasts?  The archives seem to indicate one should gap them; this
sounds difficult, so what is the advantage of doing that?  I'm hoping to
limit to about 40-45 Amps at 240-280 ish Volts (depending on if I get a
variac or not...)  Thanks for your input guys!

Scott Bogard.
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