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« on: July 02, 2006, 01:48:05 AM »
Hi everyone: I registered just to get in on this discussion. I'm a pickup maker and faced with the dilemma of not being able to put out enough product and need to automate my coil winding. I have two Adams Maxwell winders but can't afford the $4500 traverse CNC wire guide component, and its somewhat a simple piece of machinery. So I am looking hard to figure out a way to automatically wind the kinds of coils that wind that will reproduce my own personal tone signature. Right now there is no commercial programmable dedicated pickup winder anywhere in the world. Probably because no two pickup makers at the boutique level wind the same way. Larger production pickup manufacturers use more sophisticated CNC winders and either do alot of programming to make them turn out a half decent sounding pickup, but mostly they don't, they wind thousands of coils in a day and use perfect layer winding, side by side wire lay down. Sure these coils sound ok, but compared to a hand guided coil its instantly recognizeable that factory made coils are one dimensional sounding, no soul....
I am interested in having a winder built to my specs, it doesn't have to be super fancy and I don't have a ton of money to spend on it, if any of you think you can pull this off probably best to talk to me privately via email. I think this Mach3 software could be rigged to do what I want. I am not technical enough to pull this off by myself and its obvious some of you are and I've been looking for someone to help me do what I need for about 6 months at least.
I'll make some general comments about a general pickup winder though without giving away my personal winding secrets too much. The prototype I see in the pix above uses a too small motor as a drive for winding the wire onto the bobbin, don't forget that the wire is wound under tension, and sometimes at high speed winds this will choke a small motor. My Adams Maxwell winders have substantial four speed range motors that are like an industrial size sewing machine motor. Wire tension is one of the secrets of good pickups. Also on my own winder I use rubber band drive belts, Leo Fender used these, I always thought it was because he was a miser cheap guy, but not so, can't tell you more than that. I wouldn't personally want a drive motor to be a step motor and Adams Maxwell winders don't use these motors either. They are linked to the traverse system via a sensor that counts revolutions and speed, for what I want, that is unimportant, as my winder motors have counter shut offs, thats about all I need.
Also this idea of "random" winds is off the mark. Hand wound pickups aren't really random winds in the sense of one pass of the wire guide. No hand winder is going to make one pass and slow down, speed up and maybe backtrace a couple winds, I don't see a random wind like that working very well in guitar pickups. Pickups are random in the SPEED each layer is wound to the end of the coil, its impossible by hand to wind each layer at the same traverse speed and you don't want this anyway. So by hand you move your hand at pretty steady speed across the coil and then the return wind isn't the same speed so the layers have the wires more crossed over eachother, thats whats random about handwinding. In commercial winding the speed the traverse wire guide moves is called the "pitch." You can set these machines to wrap each wire wrap down next to the last wire, or use a different pitch to wind less turns for the length of the bobbin. Using various pitches gives you different tonal qualities and has to do with capacitance and inductace. Even if you randomized the pitch for each layer, not sure how that would work, hand guided winding after all is CONSCIOUS control , not just some randomness. So there's some reasons why randomness in a program might produce unpredictable results. In a commercial venture like mine I need REPEATABLE results. Sure if you're just a hobbyist winding coils the random thing could be fun, but as a pickup maker I want my coils to be what I designed them to sound like as much as possible, each one.
the setup I use now was told to me by a guy on a forum and I improved on it some and it works real well. Basically a hobby R/C wireless controller hand held pistol grip thing, a receiver and cheapo servo that rotates in precise steps. This way I can wind my coils and vary how I am holding the knob I rotate left and rigth to guide the wire. the killer in handguided winding is tendonitits, this is a serious and debilitating problem if you have to do it everyday hours at a time, having a control knob you can hold in either hand, on your lap or whatever really helps with that. . The servo moves at a matching speed that the control knob does, so its identical to my hand movements. I had hoped I could take this idea further and find someone to make a recorder for the signal that I could play back and repeat my hand wind session, that I could interrupt with my own hand guided corrections; the playback I could move the end limits of the wind and have the playback scale to the current bobbin length on the winder. Was also hoping that whoever set the software and hard linked controller up could also write a programmable interface where I could also do machine type winds with regular repeatable pitches that I set up. Well, its a good idea, uses really cheap parts, but I never found anyone who could pull it off. So thats why I'm looking into a CNC winder. I would definitely want this same idea in a CNC winder if its possible, not a "learning" option but a recorder with resettable end limits and a scalable coil length.
Anyway, so any help you guys can give or point me to someone who can build a winder for me that will hopefully do what I really need for my own work, using cheap off the shelf hardware and the Mach3 software, I'd be a happy guy. If I can get one built reasonably enough at some point thereafter I'd want another one built, and who knows maybe a few more, I really need to get into serious production soon, this isn't and has never been a hobby for me (but I LOVE it). This winder though would be my intellectual property, not for sale, I wouldn't want to a winder out there for sale that winds SD Pickups :-)
I'm also cruising Ebay looking for a used winder and may just give in and buy an already made product, some of them can be faked mechanically into doing pretty good versions of hand wound coils. OK......end or loooooong rant.......
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