Toroid winding machine

[Carl-NC]

Here's what we need for those toroidal sensors:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...e=STRK:MEWA:IT

Price is a bit steep, tho.

- Carl

[Boattow]

toroidal core winder

Yep, I've been watching ebay too. Most won't accomodate a core as big as we want. I did some searching around the net a couple years ago and found a chinese made machine that would work for around the $3000 range. Still expensive but going in the right direction. Wish someone with mechanical talents could come up with something simpler we could make.
Good luck,
FJ

[Carl-NC]

So how hard can one of these things be to build? Looks like a bobbin that encircles the toroid... load the bobbin with wire, then unload it on the toroid. The toroid is rotated by wheels as the bobbin unwinds. At least, that what it all looks like.

- Carl

[treasurediver]

I am new on this forum but I find it very stimulating. So much so that I want to take my own magnetometer project off the shelf, where it has spent the last 18 years, and try to finish it. Hopefully I get help from all you clever people that I found on this forum. Humbly I offer the few things that I have on Magnetometers, maybe some might be usefull to all.
I bought my first proton magnetometer in 1978 (Multitron), with a solenoid sensor filled with distilled water. I has a cycling rate of 1 to 5 seconds and a static resolution of about 1 nT. However when towed behind the boat, (looking for shipwrecks) it suffered from noise generated by the coax cable itself (movement) Since my search was in a region with a very weak field (22,000 nT) wher all anomalies are specially weak, it was more frustration the production.
The next mag was a Barringer 123, a better machine, but still a high noise level.
It got better when I moved to a region with a magnetic fiel of 45,000nT, but still the noise level stayed around 10, nT that meant that an anomaly of less than 15 to 20nT was hard to define.
This is when I decided to build a differential mag, with 2 sensors.
Lucky for me I managed to get help from one of the foremost inventors of proton magnetometers. He also lent me his toroid winding machine (very symple but very effective) to wind the sensors (2000 turns of #20 wire wound in 16 sections of 125 turns, he called it a balanced winding). I got sidetracked then and when I needed a mag quickly I bought a Barringer 234 that I still have now.
One thing that I could do with it is do some tests and comparisions with mags built by you and /or me, the reults might be interesting to all of us.
Oh, yes I have one more thing. A short time before his death, my friend, the great inventor, gave me a copy of his patent application for his magnetometer. Searching, I have not found the patent itself, so it seams that it somehow never made it to get registred.
This paper is some 40 years old and one may consider it outdated, but I remember using his mag, and it was the best I ever used. the cycling rate was much, much faster and the usefull resolution much, much better than any other mag I ever used, well maybe closer to the cesium mag, but more practical.
So what do you think?
Regards treasurediver

[Carl-NC]

Activity here peaks and wanes as project ideas come & go. It would be great to get a fresh infusion of energy, I think a number of people will jump in and participate. Kick it off, and see what happens.

- Carl