Unspace a spaced coil?

[strigamort]

It's easy to space a coil, but I get irritated with myself when I wanted contact and screwed it up. This seems to happen most often with springy wire like plain clapton.

Two questions.

What can I do to keep from spacing by accident? I put opposite pressure on the length of wire as I coil, but I still get spacing sometimes.

Once a spaced coil is made, are there any tricks to getting them tight again?

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[strigamort]

The current offender. The Wasp Nano has kind of a weird deck. I'm trying several builds.

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[ScReWbALL]

Holding tension in the right places is how I finally figured out how to get good contact coils without the spacing. I hold the screwdriver in my left hand and squeeze the beginning of the wire into the grip with my thumb

Then I “fold” the wire over the screwdriver and while keeping the pressure with my thumb, I use my index finger and press it into to loop I just made so that there is no chance of it springing back or losing tension

Then I just “fold” the wire back back over the screwdriver and slide my thumb down to keep the pressure on the wrap that I’m folding, alternating between using my thumb on the “fold over” and index finger on the “fold under”. As long as you keep pressure on the current wrap against the screwdriver you don’t have to worry about keeping tension anywhere else like further back on the wire. Splitting the wrap into these two “folds” rather than trying to make a wrap in a single motion lets me be much more deliberate in where I’m wrapping and how close I can get the wrap to the previous one. I most wrap multi-core Aliens than tend to lay down flat as it is, but I use the same techniques wrapping parallel claptons for my series box builds. I usually throw an extra wrap or two into my builds to account for possibly messing up the first or last wrap, so that I can pull Wraps back out if needed. Using a pair of pliers at the end and tightening the entire coil by using brute strength helps too

The last pic only looks like there is spaces because I hadn’t pulled the coil tight...after that last wrap...always have a nice contact coil with no gaps. That’s what works for me, anyway...


You're not drinking water are you?! You realize that stuff is found in antifreeze!?!

 

[mach1ne]

you can fix most/all of that once you put the coils in your atomizer and glow/pinch them a bit. once you glow them they lose that springiness and start to stay where you put them.

 

[AndriaD]

Ceramic tweezers. Pulse the coil, and while it's firing, clamp it together -- good chance it will never come apart again. If you use metal-tipped tweezers, you have to wait till your finger is off the fire btn, so you don't get quite as dramatic an effect. but the one time I used ceramic tweezers to make a contact coil, that sucker was FUSED SOLID. Course I don't use fancy coils, just single wire, but it should still work to tighten it up.

Andria

 

[strigamort]

You guys rule. Especially appreciate your thoroughness screwball.

Pinch with the ceramic tweezers. Duh. I've only done it a thousand times. Little off my game today but I did make some alien wire and 4 core fused that came out great.

Thanks guys!

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