TGSL Tuning & troubleshooting

[Stefano]

Yes Alex I'm italian too.
It seems your procedure being following ivonic's recipe and that's what i did too. I'll wait to see how it performs, I'm expecially interested in the phase behaviour as I found it the most difficult to get.

[ik5pwr]

Hi Alex,
is your coil performing as good as dfbower's ?
Do you simply yarn it then glue? what glue cyanoachrilate? don't you tape it all around?

Hi stefano,

This is my first coil with this coil winder , so I just finish my first one not test yet
yes yarn and then glue with cyanoachrilate , when dry ,finish with tape and adesive foil.

Stefano are you Italian ? I'm from Italy.

regards Alex

[Stefano]

I bind a coil with a yarn and then glue all together , but at the end of the process when a glue is dry I measure more Inductance so at this point is more difficult to remove a few coil

Hi Alex,
is your coil performing as good as dfbower's ?
Do you simply yarn it then glue? what glue cyanoachrilate? don't you tape it all around?

[simonbaker]

Yes here some pictures before bind and after , for turnable I use simpy two cd's

Nice design, and counter too! I added link to fast-winder thread under Coils.

-SB

[ik5pwr]

That looks very interesting.

Do you have picture when it is winding?

Do you mount it on a rotating turntable?

If you have rotating turntable, I would like to add link to another thread with other fast coil winders.

Regards,

-SB

Yes here some pictures before bind and after , for turnable I use simpy two cd's

[dfbowers]

I just used "Varathane" since it dries quickly. I suppose if I were to do it correctly, I should be using packing peanuts dissolved in Toluene, or some sort of dope that does not affect "Q"? I wonder if it matters at lower frequencies..

[Stefano]

My wire comes off a spool and goes though a container filled with varnish.

What kind of varnish/glue is it?

[dfbowers]

No turntable yet.. but I need one! I Need a counter as well.

[simonbaker]

Alex,

I have built 2 coils so far.. One just testing on the bench, the other I have used outside. I don't think size is so important other than I get about a 20% performance gain with a larger coil. Both coils are right around 6.0mH for TX and 6.5mH for RX. I have come across several methods of determining L without an inductance meter and they all agree.

My smaller coil measures 18 x 10mm for one "D". My larger one is just the standard 252 x 137mm for one "D".

For winding, I have a coil winder with both a top and a bottom... and spacers in the middle, along with pegs for the basic shape going through top and bottom. Now, here is the neat thing. My wire comes off a spool and goes though a container filled with varnish. It goes IN a small pinhole on one side and OUT a pinhole on the other. so.. my wire is "sticky" when it goes on the form. I am using .25MM wire 30 guage I think.

When my coil comes off the form several hours later, it almost has a cross section that is square, and needs no string to bind everything together. Then, I can easily remove a few turns to tweek the inductance a little.

Then, one layer of vinyl tape, then a layer of copper foil tape (so I can solder a ground wire to it). I find that a USB 2 cable works fine.. That's it! I get around 30mm for a 2.5mm brass coin.

Don

That looks very interesting.

Do you have picture when it is winding?

Do you mount it on a rotating turntable?

If you have rotating turntable, I would like to add link to another thread with other fast coil winders.

Regards,

-SB

[ik5pwr]

Hi Don , nice work , I have a home made coil winding machine , here a link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCN3uCHaem0 but when I finish a coil
I bind a coil with a yarn and then glue all together , but at the end of the process when a glue is dry I measure more Inductance so at this point is more difficult to remove a few coil so I need to apply your system for my
construction.

Alex

[Stefano]

My wire comes off a spool and goes though a container filled with varnish. It goes IN a small pinhole on one side and OUT a pinhole on the other. so.. my wire is "sticky" when it goes on the form

I was thinking about this in past. Tesoro coils are made in a similar way too. The winding is sink int the cast resin and mantains the same rectangular (or square) form it had when it was made probably on a D shaped mandrel mould with lateral edges, like yours have.
In all our coils, made following the recipe details, all around the wire turns turns we wind some tape as the one used by electricians, but doing this the inductance changes unpredictibly and wire to wire capacitance is probably different from the same coil made with your method.

[dfbowers]

Coil pictures..

[dfbowers]

Alex,

I have built 2 coils so far.. One just testing on the bench, the other I have used outside. I don't think size is so important other than I get about a 20% performance gain with a larger coil. Both coils are right around 6.0mH for TX and 6.5mH for RX. I have come across several methods of determining L without an inductance meter and they all agree.

My smaller coil measures 18 x 10mm for one "D". My larger one is just the standard 252 x 137mm for one "D".

For winding, I have a coil winder with both a top and a bottom... and spacers in the middle, along with pegs for the basic shape going through top and bottom. Now, here is the neat thing. My wire comes off a spool and goes though a container filled with varnish. It goes IN a small pinhole on one side and OUT a pinhole on the other. so.. my wire is "sticky" when it goes on the form. I am using .25MM wire 30 guage I think.

When my coil comes off the form several hours later, it almost has a cross section that is square, and needs no string to bind everything together. Then, I can easily remove a few turns to tweek the inductance a little.

Then, one layer of vinyl tape, then a layer of copper foil tape (so I can solder a ground wire to it). I find that a USB 2 cable works fine.. That's it! I get around 30mm for a 2.5mm brass coin.

Don

[ik5pwr]

Don , can you post a coil features , because I had a TGSL Coil but seem be wrong , Thanks Alex

[dfbowers]

I just wanted to leave a few thoughts here on the TGSL project. I have been detecting for a long time (about 30 years now). I wanted to commend everyone who has contributed to making this such an fun and worthwhile project!

I finished filling an 8" DD coil shell and took it for a run in my test garden. Even with an 8" coil, it goes JUST AS DEEP in my ground as my X5 or my Cibola. Now I put down $930.00 bucks for my X5 and and $340.00 for the Cibola.. and a whopping $50.00 in part for the TGSL!! With a good set of headphones, all targets hit just as hard as all my other detectors..
Now I realize that air test show what the POTENTIAL depth CAN be (15" on a nickel with the X5 and only 10" with a TGSL), but there is more to detecting than that. The TGSL is less noisy and has about equal performance with actual use. Coil on the left is my homebrew TGSL coil.
Don