Wind energy - Coil winding

I figure, if I want to understand coils, I need some kind of consistency in a test device.

One of the biggest issues in backyard science, is all the noise that comes with the data. This noise is often caused by changing too many things at once, or there being to many variables. If we change more than one thing, it can become impossible to determine which change brought about the different result. This can lead us to wacky habits, superstitions, or carrying baggage left over from some meaningless bit of the last test we did.

One change, one test.

Noise can also come in the form of sloppy engineering. If your race car is held together with tape, the last very slow lap on those new tyres might be caused, not by the tires, but by the fact that your gearbox fell off.

With that in mind, I thought I should make something a bit more robust than my previous device.

I made this out of, you guessed it, PVC.

I also discovered my rare earth (neodymium) magnets will stick nicely to a nut. These are the same magnets reputed to hold together with 7kg of force required to separate them.

They really are amazingly strong.

Add a bearing and a lock nut, and the neodymium magnet rotatey bit is done.

I'm never sure what tech the universe is aware of, so I'll err on the side of caution and mention locknuts.

 If you get two nuts on a threaded shaft, and tighten them toward each other you can "lock" them into position on the shaft. They will no longer spin on the shaft until such a time as you release the pressure between them. They will spin with the shaft allowing us to rotate our magnets by placing them on the nuts.

It seems, that a large plastic hose fitting has a tapered section to grip the hose. This creates a pretty good seat for a bearing.

Placing the shaft into place, then tightening the plastic "nut" presses the bearing firmly into its seat.

Giving us a nice reliable coil jig to test different wire thicknesses, and different numbers of turns on our coils.

Shown here with a wacky experimental coil that did nothing, the only thing left to do is force a flexible plastic tube over the end of the threaded shaft, and stick the other end into a power drill's chuck.

The drill should give us consistent revolutions per minute to keep our test at least a bit scientific.