Hand Coil Wave-Winder

[Yorkie]

Neat ... I like it. Thanks.

Guess you have found this: http://www.wires.co.uk/cgi-bin/ss000001.pl?page=search&SS=litz&PR=-1&TB=A&search.x=17&search.y=9 Some are down in the £20 range ...

Gary

Thanks Gary. Yes, I've looked at wires.co.uk - it's the retail arm of The Scientific Wire Company of old. They do sell Litze wire, but it's £36.00 for 100Grams, so it's out of the question.

http://www.wires.co.uk/cgi-bin/sh000001....ch%2ey%3d9&WD=litz&PN=litzwire%2ehtml%23alz00250081#alz00250081

So it would indeed have to be silk or cotton covered, and I have a large reel of 48SWG solderable cotton covered which I used to make a replica DRR2 coil for the BBC 'Focus' crystal set.

Though I had fun at my little lathe yesterday, turning down the shafts to fit the bevel gear in place of the rather crude friction drive, it's all been to no avail.

A little light has just come on in my head to alert me to refer back to the coil-winder manual about the use of bevel gears, so Ive just checked, and confirmed my suspicions that the bevel gear I've fitted will actually be useless. There's a reason which bevel gears weren't used in the original and it's this:

Quote:

'The ratio of the crank shaft to the main spindle is infinitely variable by movnig the friction wheel to any position along the shaft so that it contacts the friction plate at varying points. This is an important feature because if the ratio was simply 1:1 each successive turn would fall on top of each other and the desired pattern would not evolve. While a gear drive would be more positive, it would not be possible to achieve the very fine adjustment that can be had with this simple friction drive. It requires only a little experimentation to discover the optimum adjustment for each coil job and for very good results to be had'.

End quote.

Oh dear: 'You boy - yes, you at the back - pay attention!'.

I was really rather chuffed with the bevel gear, but I'll now have to revert back to the 'O' ring and friction drive. Numpy is as numpty does!