DIY Coil Winding Machine Counts The Hacky Way

“Wait, was that 423 or 424?” When you’re stuck winding a transformer or coil that has more than a few hundred turns, you’re going to want to spend some time on a winding jig. This video, embedded below, displays a simple but sufficient machine — with a few twists.

The first elaboration is the addition of a shuttle that moves back and forth in sync with the main spindle to lay the windings down nice and smooth. Here, it’s tremendously simple — a piece of threaded rod and a set of interchangeable wheels that are driven by a big o-ring belt. We love the low-tech solution of simply adding a twist into the belt to swap directions. We would have way overthought the mechanism.

But then the hack is the digital counter made out of an old calculator. We’ve seen this before, of course, but here’s a great real-world application.

Thanks [Jānis] for the tip!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62xKnsY–k8

11 thoughts on “DIY Coil Winding Machine Counts The Hacky Way

  1. Pretty cool. It would be easy to motorize it, use a few Hall effect sensors to multiply the speed of the bottom axle and a pair of end stop switched to automatically reverse the direction of the carriage.

  2. I used a pedometer and microswitch for my hand cranked coil winder. Probably a bigger supply of them too since the utility of a calculator tends to persist longer than the novelty of a pedometer.

    1. Guessing a restoration or some one-off like that. Something they don’t make a replacement part for. There are a lot of old radios and ham equipment that would qualify I’m bet.

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