Re: CNC coil winder traverse

Carlos,

The normal way to guide the wire is with a special wire guiding
tube. They can be bought from specialist companies and are not all
that expensive. They are really just a hardened tube with rounded
edges, sometimes they have wire cutters built in too.

Yes the wire will do what it wants to some degree. The tube will
need to be very near to the coil and again I stress the main factor
will be consistancy. The wire tends to wind itself neatly the
problem comes mainly on direction changes, the wire must be wound in
odd then even numbers of turns on each layer. I suspect that in
practise my main problem will be making a bobbin assembly with
retactable central spindle that goes together in exactly the same way
every time.

One thing I had considered if I could make the system repeatable
enough would be to wind the first coil ultra slow and have some sort
of manual overide to teach the winder what to do.

CD ROMS have high resolution but much of that comes from the magnetic
actuators that control the focussing lens, they use feedback from the
photodiode to keep in the tracks so I doubt it would be much good for
a wire traverse.

Sheldon, Both of my HP inkjets have a servo system with belt drive.
They are essentially where I got the idea from. The encoders are
mylar linear ones much like those sold by USdigital.

Graham