It's 11:00 AM here and I just hooked it up. It is now running off the unfiltered battery charger into its own filters. It's got about 15 volts going in, best I can do without the variac. However, I think it will be enough to detect heat buildup in a few hours. It used to shut down in less than 2 hours. I am injecting the power right before the thermal cutout so if it does get hot it shouldn't let the smoke out. I can't sit here and watch it all day.
If there is no heat buildup in a few hours, I'm going to disconnect it and also disconnect the secondary of the AC power transformer and just let that run with no load. At that point I can be sure the DC/DC convertor is running properly and we can trust the waveforms.
Right now, the ripple is 3 volts P-P while it was only 1 volt with the 10,000 uF.
We'll see.
Jeff Urban