making a coil winder. any information or tips?

anyone got any info on making a coil winder, I would say pick up winder except looking to wind more then just pick ups, inductors,  maybe work up to winding transformers.

I cheated and bought one, but this is a good place to check out. Lots of people there have built their own.

http://music-electronics-forum.com/f18/

Cheers!

Stewart

This: http://www.ukcnc.info/forums/coilwinder.php

Frank B.

Pucho,

It depends how much you want to spend. I made my first coil winder back in '79 when I was doing my industrial placement in a Fiat factory machine shop. But if I wanted one now I would just buy a small hobby lathe (Proxon etc), couple a counter to the chuck head and off I go. Most have very slow speeds for gear cutting. Kill two birds with one stone.

I would cheat  to be honest . but so far all I found was a semi expensive pick up winder at a guitar parts place.

Is the critical part for such a machine the counting bobbin spinning part, or the automated guide that guides the wire onto the bobbin if that is needed at all for simple coils (like the one in Franks link)?

If it is just counting and turning the bobbin, I just had a thought about the motors that I used on my CNC machine. They do a smaller one (nema17), and they can be instructed to turn any number of steps and then decelerate to a stop.

I would love to have a go at winding some transformers, but from my little bit of looking around it will seem difficult to find a good supplier of the formers, and lamination's and then the mu metal can to put them in.

Cheers,

Tim

I wound by hand before and it was tough. getting the winds that nice looking, remembering the turns and the really thin wire.  I made a few mistakes before one proper one.

hi there,

i recently built one as my final project for the FabAcademy course. It's really cheap to built and all the design files are online here:

http://academy.cba.mit.edu/2012/students/hopman.thomas/final_project.html

greetings,

Thomas

Great stuff Thomas.

Fantastic work! Love the tab and slot construction. Action movie?

T

Thomas, I totally missed all of that until now. Very cool

thanks for the replies!

so here's the good, the bad, the ugly.

the ugly is i lost my phone with some action shot's and the final presentation wasn't documented (like all other classes). So no video up until now. Currently those stepper motor's are on my shapeoko assembly to get a pcb mill running and i'm completly broke so no new stepper motors for my winder at the moment.

the bad is there's no wire tensioning (so i use my hand..) but there are plenty commercial offerings that's do the job for the price of my winder) and i did not think about bobbins that have no hole, ie guitar pickups.... so i need to redesign the bobbin holder.

and the good is that all the files are there and it's completely open source, it's cheap, hopefully people will collaborate on the design in the future if i truly make all the files accessable (put up a github or whatever for file revisions and backup).
The software for the arduino is enormously simple and can be improved upon greatly. Then again it just works as is at the moment.