If you enjoy building radio projects you may have noticed something slightly worrying over the last few years in your component supply. Variable capacitors are no longer as plentiful as they used to be. There was a time when all radio receivers contained at least one, now with the advent of the varicap diode and the frequency synthesiser the traditional tuning capacitor is a rare breed. They are still made, but they’re not cheap and they won’t appear so readily in your junk box any more.

Fortunately a variable capacitor is a surprisingly simple device, and one you can make yourself if you are of a mind to do so. [Patrick] did just that with his home-made capacitor, in this case of a few tens of pF and suitable as a low-power trimmer capacitor or in a single-chip FM radio.

Rather than make a set of interlocking vanes as you’d find in a commercial design, he has gone for a screw in a tube. The capacitance is set by the length by which the screw is inserted into the tube. And his tube is not a tube in the traditional sense, instead he has used a coil of enamelled copper wire wound on the screw thread, whose insulation forms the dielectric. It looks wrong to use a coil in this way as you’d expect a similar coil to form the inductive part of a tuned circuit, but this coil is shorted out to prevent its inductance becoming a factor at the frequency in question.

It’s evidently not the answer to all variable capacitor problems, but it’s a neat piece of lateral thinking and it will make a simple working capacitor from readily available parts.

We’ve featured a couple of more traditional style home-made variable capacitors in the past on these pages, one made from thin aluminium sheet cut with scissors, and another one designed for use in higher power transmitters.

Thanks [PeterF] for the tip.