Newbie

[stormpetrel]

Hi all

I have spent all the day on your website with a lot of excitement!
I found it by chance as I was googling for a wire supplier to try my home brewed winding machine. It’s an inkjet printer I have transformed for this purpose

A picture of the thing:

and a video http://img532.imageshack.us/my.php?i...inotronqs7.flv


The printer is controlled by the computer. You have just to enter the number of turns you want, adjust the displacement of the shuttle and set the shuttle speed for the scattering. I’m not sure if it will work properly with guitar pickups as it is, but with some modification it should do it.

But today is the D day and I would like to buy a spool of AWG42 and attempt to wind my first pickup.
As I live in New Zealand, I was wondering if there is a wire supplier in Australia or in USA where I could buy a 500g or 1kg spool of #42 AWG (EN or SPN) ?

If I have no other choice, I will go with http://www.wires.co.uk but the freight cost are really high (New Zealand is the Antipode of UK)


There is a more detailed description of the printer here
http://www.lutherie-amateur.com/Foru...r=asc&start=40
Sorry it is in French as it is my native language.

[Rosewood]

If that works that is an amazing little discovery. Let us know how it works out.

[Ruel]

Wire supplier in Australia

Some years back, I got AWG 42 from Elecrowind in Australia.

[stormpetrel]

Thank you Ruel, I'm going to contact them

[jonson]

Few numbers for you.
http://www.hotfrog.com.au/Products/Magnet-Wires

[R.G.]

Good work, S.P.!

Clever use of otherwise-junked parts.

I am writing code for a similar thing. I used the same concept for the coil spinning motor, simply a coil holder on the end of a stepper motor shaft. It works well, as you know.

I had a bit of trouble with something I noticed in your video. The "coil" seems to wobble a bit on the shaft. This would be OK-ish if all you wanted to do was wind a pickup, but would be a problem if you wanted to replicate a pickup, because the position of the wire with respect to the bobbin is a function of not only the traverse but also the wobble. I solved that by making a much more accurate and rigid adapter to hold the bobbin to the shaft.

I used what is conceptually the same mechanism for the traverse, although I built it up myself instead of copping a printer mechanism. I used a high-quality ball bearing drawer slide for a track, and mounted the wire guiding mechanism and tensioner on a shuttle which is screwed to the drawer slide. The actual movement is done by a stepper motor driving a 1/4"-20 threaded rod which drives the shuttle left and right.

[mick]

Try guitar parts NZ...he stocks some pickup stuff..

Mick

[stormpetrel]

You are right! The coil is a bit a wobbly on the video. This set-up was used to try the electronic with a length of regular string. I made the coil adapter with a piece of junk for this purpose. But yep, I will have to put a descent coil adapter to get a proper result.
I also plan to add a rigid telescopic arm on the shuttle to control accurately the position of the wire close to the pickup.

The only drawback of using an old printer for this purpose comes from the winding step motor which doesn’t turn really fast (max 300 rpm). As I don’t plan to wire pickups at an industrial scale, perhaps it will be enough?

Thanks Jonson, I will try to contact some of them.
Thanks Mick, they have interesting parts for pickup builder but the wire is bloody expensive here.

[stormpetrel]

Hi all

I did some improvements on the “bobinotron”. I have added some pulleys made from two broken hard disk. The max speed is now arround 900 rpm.



The pickup will be attached to the bottom disk. This disk is still fixed on its original shaft. Now the pickup rotates perfectly well (the mechanism which contains two balls bearing, has been designed by the HD manufacturer to turn 3 disks without any vibration at 7200 rpm). It is also possible to remove easily the disk which holds the pickup and replace it by another one (they have all the same sizes)…

Hope I will find a spool of wire really quickly now. I'm dying to try to wind my first pickup !