Coil Winding Machine Makes it Easy

[Mr Innovative] needed to wind some coils, and decided to make a machine to do the work. Making such machines has become a lot easier over the years. There was a time when we might probably have had to hack an old printer or scanner to get linear rods and stepper motors. Now, thanks to widespread 3D printing, we can order parts like that from lots of places. The 3D printing helps, too, to fabricate all the little custom widgets you need to put something like that together.

The machine looks great. It uses a number of parts that would look at home on a 3D printer or CNC build. We thought his Chinese mini table saw did a great job cutting the aluminum extrusions, but we did worry about the safety of his fingers. We’ll admit we are generally lazy and buy the extrusions precut.

Of course, for those who are only making a few coils, a dowel rod in a variable speed drill will get you there. But if you were doing even a small production run, we could see the value of this. It would be pretty simple to add software to control the number of turns, the speed, and other parameters.

This reminded us of a recent build we saw for winding pickup coils. The real value, though, is a machine to wind those pesky tesla coils with lots of turns of fine wire.