I pulled out the old Varian Filament controller and tried it out. Didn't work, no output. I popped it open and immediately found one corroded electrolytic dated 1981. Replaced that. Still no workie. Found another bad electrolytic. Changed that... Nothing. Then noticed a broken wire on the local/remote switch, I checked the switch while I was at it and it was not working correctly. Grabbed another and soldered it in place and it worked with a resistive load.

So I hooked it to the transformer. Immediately popped the breaker on the control panel. After doing some checking the transformer pulls way, way too much current for this controller which is basically just a zero-crossing triac dimmer which is rated for 2kw max or about 9 amps at 240. It looks more and more like the transformer is wound for 120v input which wouldnt be so bad but the thing pulls a massive amount of current when running higher currents. At 400 amps out it is pulling 40 amps @ 120v from the wall. That is pretty difficult to deal with.

I think what I am going to do now is use a large switching supply I have, 5v at 400A, and build a mosfet based PWM power control for it and use that. That will eliminate a lot of my electrical problems in the end.

I got the batteries for the turbo control. Need to wire them up and test it out. The batteries are too big to fit internally where the old pack was so I will use the external battery connector to hook them up, it uses a 2 pin "microphone" connector and I am going to try to find one locally tomorrow.