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  • Author Author: jw0752
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Hacking a Toroidal Transformer

jw0752

I have this beautiful Toroidal Transformer but it is 19 Volts and I need 24 Volts for my application.

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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Now that my hands are rested I am going to go back and make another one.

 

John

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  • in reply to jw0752

    John Wiltrout wrote:

     

    They apparently measure off the length of wire needed onto the hoop and then reverse the direction and wrap it onto the core. Very ingenious and a lot easier than the way I did it. My hands and arthritis are still killing me.

    Yes I thought it was ingenious too. I'd not really considered how this worked for volume production of transformers before until you raised the question, definitely interesting to see how it's done.

     

    I'm very much looking forward to somebody (i.e. you image ) trying to construct some DIY version of this for a home lab image.

     

    On a more serious note, I hope your arthritis isn't playing up too much as a result and your hands recover soon so you can get back to building cool things in your lab! image