I've now tried both (hand winding) methods , hours and hours later decided some improvenment in technique is required if I ever try it again. Shuttle and loading ring methods . Loading ring is where you have a splittable ring. Shaped like a bike rim in commercial winders, I used soome polythene pipe , cut along one side, heated over a piece of dowel to form into a U section. Reform , taped, through the torus and wind the required wire while through the torus. Works but without a third hand or at least some sort of support for the loading ring it is awkward. Another problem with it, you need a way to hold the hank of wire on the ring without any of it coming off when the required wire is unloading. I just used a cylinder of rubber that just about held in place in the U, but has to be released every 5 or 6 turns. Some sort of foot controlled motorised system to wind back the excess wire onto the loading ring, for each manual pass of the loop through the torus, would help. The loading ring, permanently in the central torus hole, gets in the way of manually posistioning and tightening the turns.
Shuttle works quite well, but slowly, as I found you could only sensibly form at most 2 turns , then 2 combined shuttle passes. I've now tried some different ways to do say 10 shuttle passes and then return to manually tighten all 10 in one go. It requires a way of gripping the wire after each pass and then the next loading turn, staggered along some gripper thing that can be removed when returning to manually form the turns proper. With enough slack to grip and tighten but not so much as to knot-up. I tried Hellerman sleeving , pieces of rubber, slid along a tension spring. Held the ire well but difficult to remove the rack. Some rubber, sliced with 0.6mm grinding wheel , alright for larger diameter wire like 1mm or more and is easy to remove before manual stage. At the moment trying to track down some large hook Velcro to see if that would work. Anyone else been here before ?
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