CNC Guitar Pickup Quad Coil Winder – MK2

About

The new Quad Winder is capable of winding four guitar pickups at the same time and ideal for Guitar workshops that need to speed up their production of bobbins.

Just like our popular Guitar Pickup Mini Coil Winder it has multiple spacing of M4 threaded holes on the Bobbin Plate, to accommodate most Guitar Bobbins out there and also pockets for magnets.
We no longer supply the magnets, but for anyone wanting to fit their own, the pockets are 10mm diameter and 2mm deep.
The magnets are handy if re-winding a pickup that already has the slugs inserted.

Where the Mini Coil Winder has 1 bobbin plate, the new Quad Coil Winder has four which are all synchronised.

Build Features

• High grade C5 ballscrew is used along with precision C5 bearings combined with anti-backlash couplers on each axis.
• Low profile Hiwin style rails for smooth running with no unwanted side movement.
• All of the aluminium plates come with a really attractive finish, as well as bead blast and oxidisation treatment.
• Using solid, thick 10mm plates creates a stable frame that increased accuracy, none of your cheap thing plates to make the machine look fancy used in this design!
• All machines are now fitted with Closed Loop motors on both feeder and bobbin assembly. This increases the torque, accuracy, speed and no loosing steps.  Speeds of above 1200 RPM are possible but as usual we always play safe and recommend 1000 RPM as the max speed !
• CE certified and RHOS compliant. Declaration included in setup manual.
• Built in safety features such as Emergency Stop, Limit switches and Safety hood.
• Four Pickups Bobbin Plates.
• Four Rotating Tailstocks that can be locked on precision low profile sliding rail.
• Four Easy flow wire guide using ceramic pulleys, felt pad adjuster and nozzle holder.
• Low cost, accurate machine which allows full control of each Axis down to degree level, to suit your winding pattern using our Scripting Engine within the software.
• Free windows software to control the machine via USB. 
• Automated options for traditional winding and also two different Scripting Engines that allow Incremental recipes to be created or Absolute recipes.
• Comes with the ARM Controller MKII board and the latest firmware.
• This is controller is a custom designed to work with our Coil Winding machines and is not available from anywhere else.

Do not get mislead by the pictures making the machine look small.

The size of the machine is 870mm wide and 400mm deep, weighing over 40kg!

It is a solid and robust machine in every aspect of design. 

Specification

• Dimensions of base plate 870mm x 400mm depth  
• Weight approx 43kg
• Max Bobbin Diameter (Height) 85mm  
• Max feeder travel approx. 100mm(35mm Between Bobbin plate & Tailstock  
• Max speed with Closed Loop Stepper Motor 1200RPM
• Feeder Max resolution 0.0005 mm 
• Wire range 0.01mm – 0.3mm (bigger wire sizes supported for single layer)
• Closed Loop Stepper motor on Bobbin and Feeder Motor
• Limit and Homing Switches.
• Emergency Stop button and safety hood (6mm polycarbonate).
• Four Manual Felt Wire Tensioner  
• Four wires guides on sliding rails that allow adjustments in X and Y direction.  
• Push buttons that interact with the software.
• Powerful onboard PSU with a wide working range Voltage：100-240V Input AC Frequency：50-60Hz
• USB controlled via Windows software (XP and Windows7 , Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 supported)  
• Degree control on the motor with speeds as low as 1RPM  
• Free Firmware upgrades and Free Windows Software.   
• 12 month return to base warranty.  

Please see our animated CAD video below that will give an idea of how the machine can be adjusted and ran.

Play

Optional Tensioners

The machine comes with a very simple felt wire tension system to keep the price down.
You would need to build some sort of support bar to guide your wires back to your spools of wire if not using the tensioners.
For small wires the spool of wire can be sat on it’s side and the wire will then be threaded over the top bar and into the back of each Wire guide. It will then go across a porcelain guide wheel, through a set of felt tensioners and through the ruby nozzle.

But we highly recommend using the correct tensioners if within your budget.

Software

All of our Coil Winding machines are controlled via the USB port of a PC running Windows, along with our custom software that is supplied FREE.
We have no plans in the future to charge for the software and all updates will remain FREE!

We have been asked why we do not offer a dedicated built in touch screen to run the machine and the simple answer is that we can add more features by developing for a dedicated computer and it is easier for our customers to update new releases as our software is always being updated and kept upto date.
We have customers that have mounted a low cost tablet to their machine that is running Windows OS or loaded the software on a Single Board Computer (SBC) along with a touch screen. Then simply connected a USB lead to our controller.

The software has been written to run on a PC with Windows operating system. It will happily run on low spec systems and will work on windows XP and up to Windows 10.
Minimum Screen Resolution for the software is 1024 x 768 or larger.

When starting the software you’ll select the coil winding profile for your machine. This will change certain parameters within the software to match the machines resolution. Below is a short list of the different settings.

• Mini Coil Winder MK4/5 – Belt system pitch is 0.0125mm resolution steps with a minimum pitch of 0.0250mm recommended.
• Mini Coil Winder MK6 ballscrew model resolution of 0.0025mm with a minimum pitch of 0.0050mm recommended.
• 200mm Coil Winder – 0.0003125mm resolution steps with a recommended minimum pitch of 0.005mm recommended.
• Quad Coil Winder – Belt system pitch is 0.0005mm resolution steps with a minimum pitch of 0.005mm recommended.
• 600mm Coil Winder & Custom – The resolution will be set within the required specification. Contact us for more information.

Automated Coil Winding Tab

As you can see above it has a dedicated database and GUI for Bobbins/Pickups where you can load and save your own. You simply enter the width, number of windings and wire size.

The software will then calculate the nearest layer count based on the pitch you choose so you can see how close you are to the original.






For the Guitar Pickups section the software comes with a populate button that will load the built in database with a default set of common guitar pickup bobbins.

For Scatter Winding, please Click Here

Standard Scripting Tab

The Scripting Engine allows us to have more control over the coil winding process by allowing you to create a series of commands to control bobbin windings and feeder movement.

These commands can be built up and saved as a script for later use.

Creating the commands is very simple by using the GUI interface to choose the options you want for each new command and press the Add Command button

Absolute Scripting Tab

The Absolute Scripting Engine takes advantage of the Flash Memory that comes with the Coil Winder ARM Controller MKII/MKIII board and can be used for buffering loads of small commands.

This removes any small delays that can be caused by the USB communications latency.

Unlike the Standard Scripting Engine which is Incremental positioning for each command, this is absolute positioning on each command.

It can be used for doing variable pitches not only down to turn level but down to degree level.

Please Click here for more information on the Absolute Scripting

3D Coil Winding Simulator

We have also added a 3D Coil Winding Simulator to the software.

Sorry to say this simulator will only run on Windows 10 but the rest of the software will work fine on Windows XP and upwards.

The simulator allows you to check your coil shape before winding.

Manual Winding

Here you can use the dial on the controller box and manually control the speed of the bobbin motor while guiding the wire by hand. This allows the machine to be used as a traditional winding machine.

But also you can now manually control the speed of both the bobbin motor and the feeder motor by using the Automated Coil Winding tab controls.

If using the Manual Controller from the Automated Coil Winding Tab then it is not recommended to run the machine full time with the manual speed controller. This is just to be used as a calibration tool, which will let you determine the best speed for winding the particular bobbin with wire you are using.

Once you have found a speed that suits the bobbin and wire combination then you should switch to automatic mode for full winding.

Below are some more screenshots of different areas of the software and the standard scripting engine. There is a video further down showing the capabilities of scripting with a variable pitch being wound.

You are welcome to download the software and install from our website in the download section

Windows 10/IoT UWP Application

This UWP application is currently in BETA and as so is limited to only the automated winding for the time being.

But the beauty of this software is it can be deployed to a SBC Board running windows 10 Core such as the Raspberry pi, this completely removes the necessity of having a full computer rig to communicate with your coil winder.

All information regarding the UWP Application can be found here – UWP Software

Coil Winder ARM Controller MKIII

We have developed a new controller board that uses a fast Arm Cortex M4 processor and brings many enhanced features to the machine.

All machines dispatched from September 2022 onwards will be supplied with the new Arm Controller MKIII.

The new ARM Controller MKIII controller still has all the features of the original MKI/MKII controllers but with the following enhancement’s:

• Manual controller dial now built in on PCB.
• Support for 3rd Axis
• 8 Inputs with 3 of them dedicated for Limit/Homing and Emergency Stop.
• Higher speed pulse trains.
• Opto Isolated inputs can be switched to use 5/12 Volts.
• On board Flash memory that can be used to buffer upto 130000 commands. This allows for very small movements to be sent to the  controller with no delay between them from the software’s new Absolute Scripting Engine and build up some fancy windings.
• Fram memory also on board for Flash memory optimization algorithm.
• Firmware now upgraded by flicking a switch and existing USB port. No more JTAG programmer needed. 
• JST sockets for each dedicated wiring loom to plug into that makes for better contact and keeps things tidier.

Examples

Below are some pickups wound by our customers on the Mini Coil Winder, but the same results can be produced on the Quad Winder, but four at a time!