Leesona 102 Updated

[JGundry]

Here are some pics of my updated Leesona 102. The tensioning wheel is bypassed as it is way too tweaky with 42 AWG wire. It is nearly impossible to keep from breaking 42 AWG wire with it engaged. The felt tensioner below it provides more than enough tension. The counters are Red Lion Cub 5's. A relay trips the solenoid to stop the wind when the preset count is reached. I can toggle to confirm the RPM for each station and also toggle to the variable clutch to do different TPL counts precisely. The Chucks have a rare earth magnet mounted in them with a hall sensor to trigger the counter. I did a complete tear down. Rebuilt the clutches, new bearings and vibration damper on the drive shaft. It should be good for another 80 years of service. It's a sweet set-up.

[kevinT]

Jon...you da Man!!!!!

That is a really sweet setup. Any chance in doing a video and posting on YouTube? I would love to see it in action

[JGundry]

Thanks Kevin. I'm sure I will post video on YouTube at some point.

[David Schwab]

Ooh, that looks nice! I love old machines. You did a great job restoring and updating it.

[JGundry]

Ooh, that looks nice! I love old machines. You did a great job restoring and updating it.

Thanks David. Helping my dad restore a 1963 Studebaker Avanti as a teen turned out to be a useful experience when it came to dealing with a old oily coil winder that needed to be ripped apart and cleaned.

[kevinT]

heck, maybe you and possum (with his video skills) can team up and do a documentary on PAFs and how they were made

[Joe Gwinn]

Here are some pics of my updated Leesona 102. The tensioning wheel is bypassed as it is way too tweaky with 42 AWG wire. It is nearly impossible to keep from breaking 42 AWG wire with it engaged. The felt tensioner below it provides more than enough tension.

Looking at that tensioner, I understand why you had to bypass it. The dancer (the black wheel on the black rod) is far too heavy for such thin wire, given the oblong shape of the bobbin onto which the wire is being wound. The wire motion must be unsteady with such a bobbin.

That said, I'm interested in the details of that tensioner. Could you take some high definition photos from various angles? Thanks.

[David Schwab]

Thanks David. Helping my dad restore a 1963 Studebaker Avanti as a teen turned out to be a useful experience when it came to dealing with a old oily coil winder that needed to be ripped apart and cleaned.

Damn that's a nice car! I had some old cars in the past... a 1963 Benz 190 (with the tailfins) and more recently a nice 1980 BMW.. I forget the model, but it was the small one. But that ended up needing to be rewired, and I sold it at that point. I had enough with rewiring my first car, a Bradley GT. Bad grounds in cars are no fun!

I'd love to see more details on the Leesona.

[JGundry]

I'll scan the detailed line drawing of the tensioner from the manual and post it. It's probably better than photos.

[Possum]

....

"Dancers" just don't work for pickups at all. I had the Azonic that was made for pickup size wire. the spring dancer that shows tension in grams would start bobbing then just get out of control at winding speeds and broke the wire every time. If you go look at TV Jones website gallery photos you'll see he uses Azonics but by passes the meter spring. If you look at Gibson's winders in recent videos they don't use tensioners at all but felt tensioners, Duncan does the same. Some of them may use dereelers like whisker discs but pretty much everyone uses felt or a tensioner with the spring piece bypassed. If you use a flourescent light to illuminate your winder you can see a sort of strobe effect on the bouncing magnet wire, you'll see multiple frequencies of the bobbing wire, its a pretty intense jerking motioin tensioners can't handle. Personally I use felt and a thumbscrew, low tech seems the best way to go....

[Joe Gwinn]

"Dancers" just don't work for pickups at all. I had the Azonic that was made for pickup size wire. the spring dancer that shows tension in grams would start bobbing then just get out of control at winding speeds and broke the wire every time. If you go look at TV Jones website gallery photos you'll see he uses Azonics but by passes the meter spring. If you look at Gibson's winders in recent videos they don't use tensioners at all but felt tensioners, Duncan does the same. Some of them may use dereelers like whisker discs but pretty much everyone uses felt or a tensioner with the spring piece bypassed. If you use a flourescent light to illuminate your winder you can see a sort of strobe effect on the bouncing magnet wire, you'll see multiple frequencies of the bobbing wire, its a pretty intense jerking motioin tensioners can't handle. Personally I use felt and a thumbscrew, low tech seems the best way to go....

I'll grant you that tensioners with dancers made for winding transformer coils and the like (using heavier wire and almost round bobbins) won't work on a pickup. But it does not follow that a purpose-built tensioner using a dancer won't work, and a dancer could help greatly in smoothing the jerking due to the oblong bobbin. I've been thinking about the mechanics for some time, and I'm curious to see in detail how the Leesona tensioners work. They look a bit like the Meteor tensioners as well. Even though they are not built for pickup winding, such tensioners are a good and traditional design.

By the way, the out-of-control bobbing implies that the bobbin rotation rate landed on a mechanical resonance of the dancer. Dancers work only if their lowest resonant frequency exceeds the highest frequency in the wire motion. A big pulley on a long thin stalk will have a relatively low resonant frequency.

[Joe Gwinn]

I'll scan the detailed line drawing of the tensioner from the manual and post it. It's probably better than photos.

Probably so. Thanks.

[kevinT]

Here are some pics of my updated Leesona 102. The tensioning wheel is bypassed as it is way too tweaky with 42 AWG wire. It is nearly impossible to keep from breaking 42 AWG wire with it engaged. The felt tensioner below it provides more than enough tension.]

I was rereading this post...how did Gibson prevent this from happening?

I have the operating manual too....There are some assumptions that i have about the machine and tensioners that i have incorporated into the formula for my PAF-style models.

[Dave Kerr]

Dumb question, but has anyone tried varying the speed within each rotation to smooth out the wire feed rate? Not that I'd have a clue as to how to go about it...

[JGundry]

I was rereading this post...how did Gibson prevent this from happening?

I have the operating manual too....There are some assumptions that i have about the machine and tensioners that i have incorporated into the formula for my PAF-style models.

Seymour's Leesona looks to be updated with some sort of felt tensioning pulley at the top where the original tensioner would have been. This functionally is identical to simply bypassing the tension wheel on the original tensioner. Seymour also has a second alligator clip with felt in it holding the wire just before the wire guide. The alligator clip does not add a huge amount of tension but the combination of the thumb screw felt tensioner on the original tensioner and the alligator clip give just the right amount of tension to make a nice tight bobbin. There are several things on Seymour's machine that are not original. It has plastic wire guide pulleys and has the original tensioners removed. Whether he or Gibson did this I don't know but they both look like fairy recent additions. Certainly not 50's era additions from the looks of the machine. I think that the bypassing of the tensioning wheel is the likely way it was done at Gibson from the beginning.

The manual has very detailed instruction on how to adjust the tensioners. But the dancers jerking because of the oblong bobbins was an issue. I think it would be possible to make them work but I doubt they would wind a coil as tightly as the felt method. The PAF coils that I have unwound have all been very tightly wound. I lost patience trying to get the tensioners to work. Every time I thought I had it the wire would eventually break. I can't imagine them being used in a factory environment when simply bypassing the tension wheel and just using the felt tensioner works so well.