DIY Winding machine with self reversing screw

Used to work at a subsea robotics company and this is the exact mechanism that was used to spool and unspool our 5000m long tethers to the robots out at sea. Cool to see it in miniature form!

Working in a woollen mill with stuff like this on a daily basis, it’s both funny and fascinating to see this tech, which is in machinery over 70 years old, manufactured by one man and 3D printer into a fully functioning machine. Great work and keep it up.

The self reversing screw is genius - nice project

The rotation is not proportional to winding, maybe if you can make sensor for bobin and add thread thickness input value to adjust speed proportion between winding and thread bobin it would make thread stack evenly

THANK YOU!!!!!! I've seriously been trying to design this exact machine for the last two years. I buy big spools of threads like Dacron for working with industrial and upholstery fabrics but I only have a small sewing machine which doesn't accept them and adaptors don't work well. This will save me a so much work!

Ah! I think I saw a reversing screw like that in 507 Mechanical Movements! Clever solution to making a spool roughly even without a controlled/limited extra axis. For more complex/precise winding tasks, an electronic axis might still be needed to make everything even, but this mechanical one does 'good enough' for just spooling things on a reel roughly evenly without all that hassle and complexity!

3 seconds in, you've already got my thumbs up. Fantastic intro video. It shows nearly everything I want to know. The rest is gravy. Nice job letting the video do the talking.

That thing looks just like my dad's fishing reel. My dad has been gone for nearly 75 years, so you can figure that out. Yeah, dad's fishing reel was a lot smaller and largely stainless steel or brass, but the mechanism is the same.

These have been used in fishing reels for a long time....and tiny if you think about the size of a reel with all the parts inside.

Leesona winding machines worked this way and had a weird mechanical glitch that caused them to wind guitar pickups in just the right way, making them more valuable than modern servo-controlled winders. I learned this when I toured some coil winding factories for a work project.

Used in yarn process. Known in the industry as a cam, dog/skid and guide. We process at about 600 meters a minute per end. Superba heatset equipment and winders.

Your designs are so clean, functional and beautiful! It's a pleasure to watch your videos and learn some things. <3

This is great! I never want to hear the filament companies cant evenly spool their filament ever again!!!

For the second rectangle you could have projected the geometry of the face (even though I see no plane, maybe it's a 3D sketch, in this case it's ok like this), for the center extrusion I would not have bothered with specifying the length : an all through, or to next face would have worked like a charm. Besides those nitpicks about Inventor, that's a really clever design !!

5:55 – Is is real? Do I really see somebody who put things like an Arduino on a socket, and did not directly solder it on??? You, sir, are a hero! Because this is how you are supposed to do things. Also, I learned that such a thing as a self-reversing screw exists. Is this what is also used for industrial applications? I can imagine those crossed threads must have a lot of wear when the screw is spun too quickly.

use two servo motors, replace the cam with an all thread rod with a very fine thread pitch, hook up an stm32, esp32, or arduino and a 595 shift register to some gate driver ic's, with dat now you can drive some mosfets and igbt and use high current 24v motors and now have a cheep winding lathe, prefect for winding tesla coils, although with a tesla coil your coil length is has to be shorter than your all threaded rod, since you only wind a single layer.... with servos you can precisely control wind speed, feed speed, coil spacing, winding and feed torque, so if you got the right motor you can wind as low 8awg to 50awg, just change dem torque and rpm specs depending what coil u bout to wind

Brilliant. Thanks so much for sharing this. I've been struggling with hand winding some small magnet coils, got a good few to do so definitely giving this a go.

Thank you for taking the time to made this in cad and giving us something to think about 😊

A very interesting machine, with a few modifications, it could be used for winding coils for electronic circuits. Thank you for this inspiration.

You know, the slight imperfections in the spooling seem to make it the perfect threader for guitar pickups. You should call the guitar pickup manufacturers and use the phrase "as close to human winding as can possibly be emulated, while speeding up the production process AND cutting costs for human winders" !