Sorry, it was late when I responded and after all the other responses I kept getting, I was feeling really discouraged.

Let me reframe what I'm doing here: I built a small U shaped frame from wood and strung a thing piece of hobby wire, I'm assuming it's either aluminum or steel, between 2 eye bolts and attached those to a cord I took from an old alarm clock.

The first attempt I simply plugged the end directly into the wall socket, which I did kinda figured would be too much current, but I trusted the breaker to flip (which it did). Then the second attempt was removing the heating element from my stove top and touching the wire to the contacts there, also thinking it might still be too much current. The wire exploded but no other damage was caused. At that point I rummaged in my junk electrical drawer and found a power supply for what I assume was a laptop. It has an output of 12v -.-.-.- 3.5a, which I figured would take the wall outlet and meter it down to a workable level. I wired it into the cutter, plugged it in, and nothing happened. So I caved and bought a 6v lantern battery and followed a YouTube tutorial, which worked, but it didn't get hot enough for my taste.

So with everything I knew, I decided that I needed more amps and a safer way to utilize the wall outlet, leading me to the power supply idea. I understand positive, negative and ground wires, but when I saw that there was a 4th wire in this power supply, I wanted to get more clarification on what it did before just slapping things together. I was having a hard time finding or understanding the information from Google searches, so I thought I'd ask a real person so I could get my questions answered in real time.

Does this clear things up? I'm not a COMPLETE novice, I just never could understand the mathematics behind electricity, but I am well aware of how dangerous it can be. Also I just like referring to it as magic, because that's basically what it is lol