3D Printing Bobbins/Formers for Coils

2020-10-27T19:31:47.1670000

My Friends,

An Experiment today, I hope it works out!

Coil Formers or Coil Bobbins are one of the hardest things to come by! In the past I have made them from CNC Cut Plexi Glass, or Acrylic Plastic:

Ref: CNC Machine

This process is expensive and wasteful!

I have designed a Coil Former/Bobbin in FreeCAD and have basic dimensions set:

I am new at this, so I believe I may need Supports to help this turn out ok. With all experiments, the process will be perfected over time.

What I use:

FreeCAD - Free CAD Design Software with hundreds of Videos on YouTube.
Ultimaker Cura - Free also excellent for 3D Printing, does all the Splicing and so on.
Ender 3 Pro an excellent and very cheap 3D Printer, I paid $260 for mine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibsOYzXduYc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG_YKeJDaX8

Very easy to put together!

Supports seem fairly easy, here is a good video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgjcapEhJJQ

I will update you asap with the result!

Best wishes,

Chris

Getting started with 3d printing

2019-07-01T20:54:42.7730000

Hi guys,

I will be starting with a series of posts regarding 3d printing.
There is quite a lot to cover and I will need some time to work it all out before I can post it here.

So, my plan is to go step by step and spread my posts over some period of time.
I'll do my best to do it as quick as possible.

Intro

For those who are not yet familiar with 3d printing but are experimenting with coils and electronics I can only recommend to get started right away. It really pays off to have 3d printing capabilities yourself. Home based 3d printing is getting mature, and these days there are some good 3d printers available that are not very expensive. Some years ago 3d printing was really only suitable for nerds that spend all their time on 3d printer tweaking, tuning and writing code. But the 3d printing technology is quickly progressing and today there are some good, affordable and reliable machines on the market that make 3d printing really easy and accessible for every one.

This might sound a bit like a 3d printing promotion article, but my personal experience is, that ones you own a 3d printer you never look back anymore. Using 3d printed spools as well as many other parts will make your life a lot easier.

Some advantages:

Each coil can separately be wound on a very low cost printed spool.
Due to this modular approach of spool printing, it helps bringing more structure in the way you organize your experiments. At least this is how it works for me. I wind many coils on printed spools and label them with their characteristics
Spool winding is much easier and less time consuming. Because the spool is a loose part that you make yourself, you can design it in such a way that you can use a power drill or motorized spool winder instead of winding it manually.
If you build a small rotation counter (i.a. using Arduino), your spools will be wound in minutes instead of hours.
Using coils on dedicated spools makes it much easier to re-build old experiments that you want to go back to,
or to let others build replications of your experiments. (by sharing spool 3d files)
If you are working with e-cores of u-cores, using printed spools saves lots of time and money. Rewinding of your cores is very time consuming, annoying and often you end up with a result that is far from perfect (happens to me ALL the time ;( .
If you want to save your well performing coils and you don't use spools it becomes expensive to buy many cores.
Increases your experimental productivity overall. By simply replacing the spools on a core you can do many experiments in the least amount of time. Also comes in handy if you quickly want to compare coils.

Disadvantages:

It will require some investments in hardware and materials
It takes some time and effort to learn how to design a product
After you went through the processes above you will feel bad that you didn't start earlier

3D Printers Discussions

3D Printing Bobbins/Formers for Coils

Getting started with 3d printing