Antique coil winder off Ebay

[David King]

I just popped the boxes open on my new coil winder.
I'm still at a loss as to how the whole thing was supposed to work but the parts sure look rugged. It's a 1/4 HP "univeral" motor with a foot pedal AND a rheostat to gross speed control. There's a compressed air actuated tailstock that is totally cool and then there's a mechanical preset counter made by TRW that's a complete mystery to me. Only one gear-set and cam with the traverse that seems to traverse once per rev. The cam controls the width of the coil and the gears must set the tpl.

This may become the foundation for the CNC winder but it's a bit heavier than I had wanted at 100lbs. I'd love any commentary as to what I should do with it

[Bruce Johnson]

A cool old machine! It looks 1950's. It's obviously made and set up for factory runs of some coarse coils. If that counter runs 1:1 with the spindle, then it looks like it recycles at 675 turns. You'd have to keep a thumb clicker or a pencil handy to keep track on a pickup coil. If it's actually 10:1, then it wouldn't be bad.

If you keep the feed mechanical, then you'd have to come up with a collection of gear sets and cams to set the feed rate and width. It could be reasonable if you want to dedicate this machine to a particular pickup line.

Or, you could remove the cam follower and drive the feed rod with a servo motor and make it CNC.

It looks like a good structure to work from. Aw, c'mon, 100 lbs is just a little coil winder!

[David King]

Thanks Bruce, i knew you would appreciate it. It looks a lot like a Geo Stevens model judging from diagrams in the 1954 Book "Coil Winding" by Wm. Querfurth
Someone sent me a PDF copy and it looks like a must read for anyone with a gear and cam follower winder.

[Peter Naglitsch]

Cool piece of machinery indeed.

Re:the counter. It seems to have two pointers (is that the right word?). I would imagine that the inner scale shows turns by the spindle and the outer scale (and the shorter pointer) is to record how many turns the inner pointer have done. So for a 10 000 turn P90 (just an example) you should have the smaller pointer at 14 and the larger (or the other way around) at 550.

[David King]

Peter, You are right it's a 25:1 clock ratio. Unfortunately it's all frozen up inside and the gear won't turn. It'll be interesting to see what's inside, probably a lot of dried grease.

[David Schwab]

That's a nice looking winder. That would make a nice platform for the CNC.

That kind of reinforces the idea I had to use a small lathe as the basis for the CNC winder. I like the idea of having a tailstock.

And heavy is good. Less vibrations.

[Bruce Johnson]

Yeah, the counter is probably just gummed up. Time for some carburetor cleaner and an air hose, followed by some WD-40! The counter is probably geared at 10:1 to the spindle, so that means it would go up to 6250 turns before repeating. You can see that the outer ring has "half" graduations....I doubt that it would be necessary to count a half turn! So each of the numbers is X10. The hands are probably friction mounted, so you dial in the number of turns that you want, and then watch it count down to zero. It might even have a limit switch inside to shut off at zero.

It may not be too hard to make up a set of gears and cams for it. They're probably a very simple pattern.

I agree that if I were building another winder, I'd probably start with a small metal lathe. It's already got most of what you need. I even have an old junk Atlas/Craftsman mini lathe sitting around that I bought somewhere for $20 many years ago. It could certainly be made into a winder.