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  • Author Author: michaelkellett
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Coil Winding Machine

michaelkellett

 A while ago (October) I ordered a coil winding machine from Alliexpress.

It took a while to turn up (6 weeks or so) but it was free shipping.

Several vendors sell the same machine with slightly different labelling and features. The prices vary widely from the £450 approx that I paid for mine to over £2k for one with European branding.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000159280083.html

It was adequately packed (survived several weeks on Chinese railway without damage) and cam with almost no instructions at all.

This wasn't a surprise and I had already located some Youtube videos and reassured myself that the machine was popular enough for there to be a good chance of getting help.

The controller is widely used (and I suspect cloned) and I was able to download a reasonable decent manual in English. It's the kind of English that seems to have been translated into Chinese and back again a few times but with the machine in front of you and a bit of patience it starts to make sense. The controller is actually quite good.

The machine came with a taping system (not shown in my pictures) and a pretty reasonable set of wire guiding parts. Fairly agricultural in design and workmanship but perfectly serviceable.

I've had the covers off the winder and it's solidly built and a reasonable design - only time will tell how reliable.

I bought a couple of wire tensioners and made my own stand for them.

The first real job I've done is winding some transformers for a low noise power supply on an RM10 pot core. There are four windings, each centre tapped and wound with Bifilar wire, either 0.28mm or 0.19mm.

One of the windings is for an isolated interface to the system so should ideally stand of 100V or more. It goes on last and has some extra insulation.

I found it very hard to get a good range of sizes of yellow transformer tape in the UK but it is available on Aliexpress in 1mm width increments and cheap.

The pictures tell the story:

image

Just about to wind

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Overall view of the set up

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I've put to tensioners on one stand.

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An adapter for RM10 bobbins machined from HD polyethylene

image

The last winding with ptfe insulators where the wires have to share a slot in the bobbin with another winding.

I'm running the machine at 1% speed and the motor sounds  a bit rough. It's much smoother at higher speeds.

So far I'm pleased with it.

MK

  • You need this one:

  • Hi Michael,

    It looks great, and superb value for money. After having started my DIY coil winder, I now realize that the software is non-trivial! 

    I have not had a chance to progress it much further, and it's a lot of time and effort. A ready-made coil winder sounds a lot more attractive.

    So far I've written a motor driver class for the particular chips I was using (TB67S581FNG), and then trying to encapsulate 'winding' and 'feeder' in separate objects. It's quite ropey currently! And none of it is tested. Photo below shows the board, the wire connections are going to a PicoProbe debugger. 

    image

  • That looks pretty good.  I have wound coils using a lathe to spin the bobbins, with wire tension and moving done manually.  Your results look much better.

  • Looks like it does a good job.

    I wonder how durable it will be over the long haul.