Almost ready
For rewinding transformers or coils I made this thing from junkbox parts. The open wheel and brake is from an old sewing machine . The aluminum from an old grinding machine. The other parts are spares from my Unimat mill. This way I can mount every accessory of my lathe to it. After the pictures and some use I changed some minor things. I added a wheel on the bold I use to clamp the coil. Now the wire is better guided . I hang a “hook” over the CU wire. I can “tune” it by adding small weights. This way I can alter the tension on the wire so it winds the turns next to each other. I was thinking about motorizing the left/right movement too but that is not easy because it depends on turn speed and wire thickness.
ready for action
In the past I used my lathe for this but for small coils made from 0.11mm wire the speed was to high. Besides that I had a problem counting the turns. The lathe is not in my lab. To solve that I could make something with an Arduino.
Because I have several counters in my lab I wanted to use the event-count function many counters have. To generate a trigger pulse I used an optical detector from a computer-mouse. As you see in the picture below a piece of pcb mounted on the drive-wheel passes through the detector. The datasheet told me it needs 5V so I added a 7805. The motor runs at 9V. I use that to feed the 7805. The detector gives TTL pulses I feed to a Hameg counter. All is build a bit crude because I did not have much time but it does what it has to do so I’m happy with it.
turns counter