Hello.
OK, this might be a bit of a curved ball but hey, its my workbench thread!
A while ago I came across this post on YouTube...
Its a guy who has set himself a huge challenge of making a Archer automaton. This particular video detailed ho he overcome the problem of control wire routing within the automaton. The solution he came up with was to manufacture some miniature bowden cables. This inspired me as I have a few ongoing projects where something similar would be very useful.
So, roll on a few weeks later and I came up with this machine...
This is my thinking behind it. The guy in the video uses a rigid mandrel in a lathe with some telescoping brass tubing to support both the mandrel and the wire he is using to wind onto the mandrel. I thought to myself that I could take his idea in principle and miniaturise is even further to make really small bowden cables. This would mean to make them in the lathe would be complicated as I would need to power both ends of the mandrel at the same speed to stop any twisting.
Thats where the machine above came from. Its been literally thrown together from some tubing, a few chucks and toothed belts from Ali Express and some 3D printed parts. The idea is the mandrel is clamped between 2 (wobbly) jacobs chucks, the support bracket on the right can slide up and down the tubes so the mandrel can be tensioned, the motor then powers both chucks via toothed belts at either end and a driveshaft between the two ends.
First experiments look promising..
The above is a 0.3mm Phosphor Bronze wire inside a PTFE tube wrapped in 0.2mm copper wire (its all I have right now). It has an overall diameter of just over 1mm.
It looks like I can go even smaller. The above is a 0.3mm wire inside a 0.2mm copper spring. Overall diameter is 0.75mm. Both seem to work really smoothly. It hasn't been as straightforward as it looks though, it did take a bit of 'trial and error' to get a feel for what I need to do to achieve the above.
In conclusion, I think that I now have a way to produce my own mini wire in tube bowden cables. There is a huge amount of room for improvement with the machine and technique but it seems to do exactly what I wanted it to as it is. Sure, if I was mass producing something, I could automate more of it but I am not so I don't need to. It was something I threw together to do a specific job.
The plan is to dial in the mandrel size as the diameter and smoothness of the mandrel seems important, plus I have some soft Brass wire winging its way over from China so I can swap out the copper.
Julia
