Stepper Motors

I recently took on a project that has required me to think about timing in ways I never have before, because I've never needed to before.

The project is a device that uses three stepper motors to help me build vape coils. And in the world of vape coils, there is a thing called a clapton which gets its name from the musician, Eric Clapton, but the original implementation of a clapton on a vape coil was to take one wire of a certain gauge, then take another wire of a higher gauge and wrap it around the first wire much like a guitar string.

See Video

The practice of "claptoning" wires has evolved to include an almost infinite variety of various ways to bind wires together. Indeed many have become artists in their coil builds where people have built some fascinating-looking coils. It is a culture that evolved into its own.

So this device I'm building uses two stepper motors to hold one wire and pull it tight, while a third stepper must slide down a rail while it feeds the wire to be claptoned onto the main wire.

When you have just one wire and one clapton wire, this is relatively easy to do by hand with a drill and a fishing swivel. It starts to become difficult, however, when you have multiple wires that you are trying to bind together with a clapton that goes over all of them and it gets worse when you need to gap the spacing of the clapton by one or more widths of the claptoning wire.

Here is a video showing an EXTREMELY ROUGH example of claptoning multiple wires together

Believe it or not, doing that by hand with a drill is VERY difficult...