I have this beautiful Toroidal Transformer but it is 19 Volts and I need 24 Volts for my application.
It has a nice big donut hole and I have plenty of 16 GA solid enameled wire so I decided to add a few more windings. The first step was to figure how many windings I would need. I used some lighter gauge wire and wound 10 windings, hooked up the transformer and measured the voltage. I had 1.7 volts for the ten windings so 29 windings should give me the boost I need. This can't be too hard, I thought. I made a loose coil of wire and kept winding it around and around until I had the thirty that I needed. Next I secured one end of the wire to one of the existing wires and started to work backwards. I pulled the wire as tight as I could and went around and around until I had worked my way back to the last wind. Here is what it looked like.
Now that looks simple enough but I am writing this blog to let my hands stop aching. That was really hard work. I had to wonder how they wind these transformers when they have to put hundreds of winds on them. I can't imagine what kind of machine would be able to perform what I just did with my hands. If anyone knows how they do it I would really like to know.
I next used some cloth tape that I had and began to wrap strips around the transformer to hold the windings in place and to protect the wire. Here is the transformer after this procedure.
Finally I figured out the correct phase so that the voltage in my windings would add to the existing secondary and made a good solder connection. A few more winds of cloth tape to polish things up and I was done. A test of the transformer revealed 25 volts output with 118 Volts input.
Now that my hands are rested I am going to go back and make another one.
John
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