Time for a new Warpinverter build

Author	Message
rogerdw Guru Joined: 22/10/2019 Location: Australia Posts: 955	Posted: 12:02am 15 Mar 2021         Warpspeed said   The rectangular wire will be absolutely brutal to wind. The smallest size is I believe 3mm x 3mm and the largest I have ever seen is 4mm x 25mm. Normally it is supplied on a very large diameter drum, and wound straight onto a very large diameter transformer bobbin with a POWERFUL machine. Try buying some aluminium from Bunnings, rectangular aluminium bar of similar dimensions. Try wrapping that around a toroidal core, and see how that goes !!! You will quickly realize that solid copper bar its just not practical for a toroid in the larger sizes. Even round wire anything slightly over 2mm diameter starts to become a real challenge. The very fine stranded single insulated automotive/marine battery/starter cable is by far the easiest to work with. Welding cable is the same stuff, but it is double insulated and uses up more precious space through our rapidly shrinking hole. The welding cable is more readily available though, and is usually sold by the metre which can be more convenient. The outer orange layer can be fairly easily peeled off. Yeah, I'm pretty well sold on just buying some fine stranded automotive or welding wire to add the heavy windings. Twisting 2 meters lengths may be doable, still painful  ...  but 15 meters!!!  ...  the only reason I'd consider twisting my own is if I have miscalculated somewhere and don't have enough room for the pvc insulated wire. I did look at the range at Jaycar when I was in the city last week  ...  but at those prices I'll want to work out very accurate lengths before I lash out. I also got some prices from the links you sent me earlier in the thread so plenty of options.