OK BigB, I just sent you an Email with a screen capture of a CADD drawing. There are alot of reasonably priced automotive style relays out there that will handle 30A. The time delay is what makes things get pricy. It is easy to tweak this circuit but a couple of things should be considered. If you were to use a very low value resistance and a very high capacitance, it would be possible to pulse the relay with the cap charging current. If you add your coil resistance and resistor value and multiply by the capacitance in Farads, you get a "time constant" in seconds. In theory, the voltage on the gate of the SCR would reach about 63% of your 12 volt supply in this time. But the SCR will fire in < 1 time constant unless you add something to the gate circuit. Why don't you start by grabbibg a 10k & 100k resistor and 100uF & 470uF cap., plug and chug, and see what you come up with. Feel free to Email me with comments, questions, or descriptions of the smoke rings.
My apologies for morphing this into a theory post.
Joe
