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Andre Jute Andre Jute is offline
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Default Tranny options from cheap to expensive to dicey

Patrick Turner wrote:

Happy winding


You can see in contemporaneous threads precisely why I read a few
books on winding
transformers, then decided to do the job right. Doing it right means
one of two things:

1. Finding out who is the best commercial winder in the world --
bound
to be a supplier to the broadcast trades, with supply to the guitar
trades coming a very close second -- and adapting your circuits to
suit his off-the-shelf transformers. The best commercial winder in
the
world if you aren't counting pennies is widely agreed to be Lundahl.
If you're counting pennies, you can't beat the guitar amp tranny
winder Hammond.

2. Finding out who is the best designer in the world and let him
design his heart out to achieve he precise effect you want. This is,
again by the widest possible acclaim, Menno van der Veen. I have no
idea whether Menno will design one-offs for the punter walking in off
the street; the work he did for me had clear commercial possiblities
and the transformers he designed for me later went into production.
However, Sowter will adapt one of the many sound transformers in
their
list to your custom purposes and they are not very expensive. Or
Patrick Turner or Lucas Cant will design and wind a transformer for
you from scratch for pretty much starvation wages (it will still be
pricey compared to Lundahl), which might be very attractive if you
live in Australia and don't have to consider carriage.

Unless you already have a tranny you can strip down for parts, or can
buy a kit of parts (expensive in RS, and you have to take what is
offered, just about zero choice), it will probably cost more to DIY a
pair of trannies or a singleton than to get one custom designed and
built by people who can take the parts off the shelf.

3. There is a possibly less expensive but much dicier alternative.
Buy
a custom or standard design from a recognized designer, or make your
own design, and take it to the local armature rewinders. There's one
in any medium-sized town, or the next town along; try the yellow
pages. They have all the necessary parts on the shelf, or at most a
week away from regular suppliers who won't even take your call. Or
local commercial transformer winders, perhaps to the marine trade,
may
be set up to take an order for a pair of trannies. A chap called Russ
who came to RAT for years had his own design of trannies wound by
winders he picked out of the phone book, with great satisfaction
according to his reports, and at a price not too much over what
Sowter
charges IIRC. It is worth repeating that you must have a complete
design and instructions ready to go or you will be hit with hourly
charges that will pop your eyes. This method saves expensive carriage
but if you get it wrong, all your money is wasted and you will wish
you had gone to known-good specialists with their own established
tube-
knowledge.

Of course, you might decide that you're going to wind your own
regardless, in the belief that real DIYers do *everything* themselves,
in which case we say, in my local vernacular, Fair doos to yous.

Andre Jute
Visit Jute on Amps at http://members.lycos.co.uk/fiultra/
"wonderfully well written and reasoned information
for the tube audio constructor"
John Broskie TubeCAD & GlassWare
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containing vital gems of wisdom"
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Multi-grid Multi-grid is offline
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Default Tranny options from cheap to expensive to dicey

On Oct 17, 4:54 am, Bret Ludwig wrote:
Motor rewinders are generally both unwilling and ill equipped to wind
transformers. In a pinch they may wind up a simple one primary, one
secondary power transformer or a choke but that's as far as they want
to go. They don't understand broadband low frequency magnetics AT ALL
and have no test equipment (beyond simple meters, hypot and growlers)
or procedures to test them.

Get your transformers from a shop that winds audio transformers
extensively and caters to that business.


hey-Hey!!!,
Or take apart one that looks good and figure out how it works. While
it isn't likely to that you can go from RDH4 to ___? it is quite
possible to analyze ___? with the tools in RDH4 and determine *WHY* it
was built a certain way.

From there lots of possibilities branch off. Lamination options for

one, wire gage, and impedance mods for another...or re-arranging the
taps in the plate winding for a particular location.
cheers,
Douglas

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