Tired of Winding Coils by Hand? This Machine Does It Perfectly

Anyone who has ever built their own linear DC motor or powerful electromagnet knows how incredibly tedious it is to wind a large coil of wire. The winding just goes on and on and on, seemingly forever. It’s mind-numbingly boring, yet you have to stay focused the entire time or you’ll make a mistake and have to undo your work to fix it.

YouTuber NeverGetTiredEngineering had to wind a lot of coils for recent projects, and he got totally fed up with the process. So much so that he plans to never do it again. No, he didn’t give up on building anything that requires a coil — he engineered his way out of the situation. NeverGetTiredEngineering built a machine that quickly winds wire coils, and it does an absolutely perfect job every single time.

Built around a heavy machined base plate, the system uses a rotating spindle to hold the coil while a precision linear traverse mechanism guides the copper wire back and forth with extreme accuracy. The traverse rides on a linear rail and ball screw assembly, allowing the machine to place each wrap exactly where it belongs.

To ensure the machine remained rigid and vibration-free during operation, many of the critical structural components were CNC machined. Larger pieces, including the base plate and motor mounts, were outsourced for multi-axis machining, while smaller custom components were fabricated manually in the creator’s workshop.

A custom-designed PCB controls the movement of the machine. The board includes a microcontroller, user interface hardware, and a pair of TMC2209 stepper motor drivers. These drivers are well known in the maker community for their smooth micro-stepping capabilities and quiet operation, which is especially important when handling delicate magnet wire that can easily snap.

To use the machine, operators enter parameters such as wire diameter, spool width, and desired turn count using a rotary encoder and button controls. Once started, the firmware calculates acceleration profiles and electronically synchronizes the spindle and traverse motors so the wire advances by exactly the correct amount for each spindle rotation.

In a typical coil, the wire forms a continuous helix, which eventually causes layers to shift and stack unevenly. Orthocyclic winding instead places each turn parallel to the previous one, allowing upper layers to nest neatly into the grooves below. The result is a much denser winding pattern with improved copper fill efficiency.

In testing, the machine successfully produced tightly controlled coils automatically, though the creator admitted the system still needs refinement. Small tension inconsistencies occasionally caused the wire to jump out of position, creating alignment problems later in the winding process. Even so, this automated winding machine is a huge step up from doing the work manually.