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Author Topic: Coil winding machine ( Wizard needed)  (Read 254582 times)

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ynneb

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Re: Coil winding machine ( Wizard needed)
« Reply #20 on: May 11, 2006, 02:40:13 AM »
You may need to have an adjustable arm so that the wire can be supported as close to the spool as possible.
I did an apprenticeship as an armature winder as a kid ( Dud Trade) and I know how the wire can run away if not held close to the spool. Anyway I guess you we can edit this as we go. I think I might follow closely your design but out of MDF for the proto.

Whirleybird, a 6 M one sounds exciting. I am expecting only part of this screen to work at first. Just a plain flat coild wind. I am starting to wonder how you would go about making G-code for irregular shpes like props. I guess 1 turn of an irregular shape is the same as one turn of a regular shape item.
Re: Coil winding machine ( Wizard needed)
« Reply #21 on: May 11, 2006, 09:37:30 AM »
I know I will have to do something with the tensioner, I made it keyed with a single bolt so that it could be adjusted in height, or easily replaced as the design evolves.

For the guide tensioner I envision 4 bearings beings pressed against the wire with a nylon screw being driven into one or 2 bearing(s) to act as the guide and tensioner.

I try to keep things ea sealy modified, as changes are inevitable.

Whirlybird, a six meter long bed, that would be a nice filament winder, or one could be used to make one heck of a Tesla coil. Life sized lightning anyone?

Re: Coil winding machine ( Wizard needed)
« Reply #22 on: May 11, 2006, 02:51:26 PM »
A filament winder would be fun and an easy next step, I'm just concerned about trying to figure out the propper paths for the filament. There is more to it than just laying one fiber right next to the other, the direction and orientation of the fiber contributes significantly to the properties of the part.
Re: Coil winding machine ( Wizard needed)
« Reply #23 on: May 11, 2006, 03:21:14 PM »
that is true. they are often wound with many filaments at once and the filaments are aplied in a diagonal pattern on the mandrel the guide head shifts position at the end of th path ready for the return trip
There is always an ofcut at each end due to the thickening efect of the direction change.Flat woven tape can be wound in this manner also
Re: Coil winding machine ( Wizard needed)
« Reply #24 on: May 21, 2006, 10:53:54 AM »
The cnc workshop was great! Brian and Art were a pleasure to meet and get to know. Both of the were wonderfull, willing to sit for hours and aswer everyones questions helping all the crowd that followed them everywhere. Brian is great not only did he get the level wind coded, but he tought "Sarge" and I how to do it at the same time.  This "give a man a fishing rod and not a fish" philosophy worked great, as I have already started changing the code to make it wind better with thicker materials. I needed to stop the rotory axis after each pass so that it wouldn't over run the spool  side as the X axis was decellerating and reacellerating.

I also changed it from running in rapid to feed mode, making the Rpm box work as the feed input. I realize that it is not rpm but it acts to allow choosing a speed. I'll work on getting the ball and random wind to work, But have patience as this is learning project for me. 

Brian and I talked about two different types of random wind. One would make a random number of coils over a random distance untill the spool width if filled, the other would merely give a random number of coils over the entire spool width.

Right now I'm modifying the winding machine to bring the guide closer to the spool which should help provide better control of the material being wound. When this is done I'll get back to working on the code.

On the fly rod filament winder front, there was a gentlemen at the workshop who was importing linear rail in legnths up to 40 ft long at the cost of about 100$ per meter I have added the fly rod filament winder to the project list, there are a few others infront though.


Re: Coil winding machine ( Wizard needed)
« Reply #25 on: May 29, 2006, 10:05:22 AM »
Hello,

This looks great!  I just threw away the sewing machine guts I have had lying around to make a manual pickup winder for my electric guitars.  All of my CNC tables are routers for woodworking / inlay purposes, I don't cut metal at all on them.  Would you be interested in selling kits of all the mechanical parts?  I would love to build a CNC pickup winder.

-James
Need winder built.....
« Reply #26 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.......
Re: Coil winding machine ( Wizard needed)
« Reply #27 on: July 02, 2006, 10:20:10 PM »
Hope this thread isn't dead or everyone's out shooting off fireworks. The more I think about this idea of mine the more I think maybe I should try to build just the traverse myself and maybe get some help with the software here. I really only need the traverse and looking at the prototype built here it looks pretty simple, just need help sourcing those parts etc. Anyway hope to see followup on this thread soon, happy fourth everyone.......
Re: Coil winding machine ( Wizard needed)
« Reply #28 on: July 04, 2006, 09:14:44 AM »
The parts you can get from MSC ( http://www1.mscdirect.com/cgi/nnsrhm??KNC-T7L391316886 )

You would not need a wizard at first... You could write a Gcode program to get coil that you like and after that we could make a quick wizard :)
Fixing problems one post at a time ;)

www.newfangledsolutions.com
www.machsupport.com
Re: Coil winding machine ( Wizard needed)
« Reply #29 on: July 06, 2006, 08:02:06 AM »
I don't know what parts are needed, not a clue. Sorry I don't understand the "wizards" concept or how the Mach software even works, it seems my explanation of a guitar pickup winder doesn't interest anyone but me :-) Somehow the bridge between art and technology is something I can't seem to find, I'll keep looking, thanks for your time.......