So I've built a small rod wrapping station. I am looking for a way to power it. I have found an old corded drill that I plan to use to turn the rod. The issue I'm running into is how can I hold the rod without messing up the grip. If anyone has any ideas of a cheap or free way for me to fix this, or knows where I can find more information about this it would be awesome. Thanks in advance.

If the drill has the chuck on it get a piece of scrap blank that will fit into the butt of the rod Don't tighten the chuck to tight or you may crush the piece of scrap

Bill - willierods.com

if you do that , but a metal rod in the scrap or a wooden dowel in the scrap an use that in the chuck

William Sidney
AK

Jordan,
I appreciate your effort.
The one thing that you need to be able to do is to be able to turn the rod at 1-2 rpm for a long period of time when you are wrapping. Will the drill run at this speed reliably?

If you can't turn at this speed, I expect that you are going to have trouble wrapping the rod.

Yes, on the use of a piece of material that is inserted into the open end of a blank for wrapping. It works very well. I normally use piece of solid fiberglass from scrap cut offs of solid glass blanks. But another ready source for solid fiberglass is a driveway marker from your local hardware store. You can normally get a 3 foot driveway marker for a few $$. Then, chop it to the length that you want and with the piece of stock in the drill run it wide open and apply it to a spinning belt or disk sander or even a plain sanding block to taper the solid piece of stock to a tapered stick that fits nicely on the inside of the blank for a nice fit. If the fit is correct, there will be plenty of friction in the fit to use the solid stock to turn the rod while wrapping while doing 0 damage to the blank. Then, when the rod has been wrapped, glue on the butt cap and close up the open end of the rod butt.

Here is a power unit that I made some years ago using a discarded 24v cordless drill motor. I stripped down the drill to the motor and chuck and gear assembly. This particular drill has a 2 speed switch. High speed is 1500 rpm and low speed is 300 rpm. When I used it for some light handle shaping, I set the speed to the high speed. If I used the motor for wrapping I used the low speed setting. With the speed control that I have for the 24 volt drill, I have no trouble keeping the motor at a 1-2 rpm. When I needed it, I also used it for a dryer power unit turning about 7 rpm.

If I have the bare end of the blank exposed, I use the tapered fiberglass stick to power the rod. However, if the handle is finished with a butt cap, I will use the 3 inch Taig chuck shown in the picture. The Taig chuck is held to the drill motor by using a "shank" that has a 1/2 inch shaft on one end, and a threaded inert with a 3/4 X 16 thread.



Good luck

I use a discarded 35mm film container with a hole drilled thru the bottom and a bolt inserted thru the hole from the inside. A nut and lockwasher hold the canister to the bolt, the bolt is then chucked in the drill. The rod butt fits into the canister as a press fit. Some shimming may be needed. Roger is right. You can't power wrap without some type of foot control. This is beyond my scope of electro-mechanical ability. Good luck, Lynn

With respect to Lynn's comments about the use of a foot control for the drill. He is correct.

For the money, the Foredom electronic foot control works very well at a reasonable price. Pull the trigger on your variable speed drill and set it to the maximum speed and lock it in place with the lock button on the drill.

Then, plug the drill into the foot speed control and plug the foot control into the outlet. Now you will be able to vary the speed of the drill using your foot and leave both hands free for rod wrapping.

[www.amazon.com]

This foot control is about the best foot control on the market with a reasonable price to give you the control that you want for your drill speed.

Be safe

I cannot fathom wrapping a rod at just 1 to 2 RPM. I suspect Roger made a typo there. Give some thought to how slow that is - you'll die of old age before you get a wrap done. At maybe 60 wraps required, that's one hour to wrap 1 guide.

Plus, you really need a variable speed set-up if you're going to use the machine to wrap guides. Most drill powered rod lathes are used for turning cork and EVA, not wrapping or finishing.

..............

Tom,
No, I meant to say 1 to 2 rpm.
The reason that I say this is one of the most difficult things to do for a beginner is starting the wrap. This is when the 1-2 rpm is necessary to get the wrap started. Once the wrap is started, then, sure - pedal to the metal. You can wrap at 1000 rpm if you are doing a long butt wrap and that is the speed that I do for long wraps. But, of course 50-60 rpm is a nice average speed for wrapping, once the wrap has started.

As Tom pointed out, a high speed drill works really well for turning, but maybe not so well for wrapping. But, if you have a two speed drill so that the highest speed is 200-300 rpm, then the drill can excel as a power source for a wrapper.

One typically does not find a 2 speed transmission on most variable speed AC drills, unless it is a very heavy duty drill, but it is actually quite common on DC rechargeable drills. The low speed torque character of a dc motor is also the reason that I only use DC motors on my wrappers and dryers. This style motor simply works very well for me for these uses.

Take care

I cannot envision bothering with power to start a wrap. You do the first 3 or 4 revolutions by hand. Once it's locked, you take off from there. Trying to start a wrap under power would be slow and cumbersome.

..................

Roger, I,m using a 2 speed, 12v rechargeable drill, (batteries long since dead) hooked to a power supply that runs on 110v and outputs 12v dc. could I plug this into a foot pedal of some sort so I could use it for long wraps such as tiger bottom layers. I normally wrap by hand, but these take forever! Thanks, Lynn

What I did when I first started was take a 2" PVC cap and drilled a hole in the center. I ran about a 3/8" bolt through the hole and put a couple nuts on it which allowed me to lock the cap onto the bolt and then slide the bolt into the drill chuck. I then took four short screws and placed them at 12, 3, 6, and 9 o'clock positions. Lastly, I took two O rings that were big enough to stretch across the opening over the screws so that they cris-crossed each other. With this setup, I could attach a butt grip to the blank if I wanted to and slide it into the O rings or leave the grip off.

Lynn,

Here is an example of a foot control you could use:

[m.harborfreight.com]

Chris

Check the Buy Sell page There are usually several there
Unless you are doing production or many under-wraps I don't bother with power

Bill - willierods.com

Thanks Chris, Bill.

If you can find an old sewing machine you will have the controller and a good motor to use

Bill - willierods.com

Lynn,
Basically to control the speed of a dc motor, you can use one of two different methods.

1. You can vary the voltage applied to the motor. i.e. start at 0 volts = 0 speed. Increase the voltage on up to the rated voltage - in this case 12 volts, and that will give you maximum speed of the motor.

2. You can use a pulse width controlled speed control. A Pulse Width controlled module or pwcm is an electronic device which incorporates a high frequency oscillator and a pulse with control circuit. The oscillator, effectively runs at 10khz to 20 khz, or a frequency that is typically out of the range of human hearing. Then, the pulse width control, chops, this applied voltage or 12 volts, into what appears to be a chopped DC voltage. When the width control is set at 0, there will be no energy going to the output circuit of the module. When the control is set at 10%, the pulse width of the chopped dc voltage is equal to 10% of the total 100% pulse width, and thus you will get about 10% speed at that setting. This can continue on up to 100% pulse width - which will give you 100% of the speed.

In either of these cases, you can take the voltage regulating or the pulse width regulating item or in most cases a variable resistor and incorporate it into a foot pedal. Then, by changing the position of the foot pedal, the position of the variable resistor changes, and the voltage, and or the pulse width changes, and the motor speed changes as well.

Some foot pedals, effectively take the speed control trigger out of a drill, and mount it in a foot pedal, so that when the pedal is depressed, a lever pushes on the trigger and varies the speed of the motor. Some trigger assemblies are such that it is easy to remove them from the drill handle and relocate the entire speed control into a pedal. But, other trigger assemblies are separated by parts, so that it is very difficult to remove all of the pieces to recreate the speed control into the pedal.

Be safe

With respect to starting a wrap by hand, and then wrapping under power:

I do not do that, simply because, I have a positive lock up on the power wrapper chuck and the blank, so that the rod does not turn, unless the motor is asking the chuck to turn.

Also, I have no reason at all to start a wrap by hand. As I pointed out earlier, with the ability to turn a rod positively at 1-2 rpm allows one to easily start a wrap, and once started, the speed is increased on the wrapper to advance the wrap to the point where the pull thread is installed, and then the wrap is completed, and the thread is pulled through the pull thread for locking up the wrap.

Be safe

Bill, I just searched for my moms old singer portable sewing machine, and I suspect my niece might have beaten me to it. (Many years since mom passed). Roger thank you for all the info. I should have stated in my post I would have preferred a variable speed foot pedal. Progress has been made. Jordan, thanks for starting this thread, it sure took off! Lynn

I have found an old 18 volt cordless drill that i no longer use. I took it apart so that the whole casing and trigger are off the motor. Not sure what to do from here. I tried to find a 9 volt battery laying around and only found a dead one. I feel like the 18 volt battery would be to fast, but I cant think of anything else to use as a power supply.

Jordan,
Is the cordless drill that you have taken apart - a variable speed drill, or is it a single speed unit?

The situation that you have with the cordless drill is that a cordless drill uses a pretty powerful motor. As a result, the motor requires a fair amount of current to run properly.

For power wrapping, you only need a fraction of the available power that is present in the cordless drill that you have on hand.

Basically, I suspect that you need about a 5 amp 20 or 24 volt power supply to run the motor. If the trigger was a variable speed trigger, you could doctor it up so that you could use it as part of a foot control for the drill.

For power wrapping, the drill motor has one big significant down side. The gear trains on drills are noisy. It is not that the noise is a big deal, but if you are in the shop wrapping rods for a few days over many hours, the noise of the gears get to be somewhat tiresome.

If starting from scratch, I would pick up a small DC gear motor with a top speed at its rated voltage of about 500 rpm. This style motor makes a near perfect power source for power rod wrapping. With the 500 rpm top speed, it is very easy to get a nice solid 1 to 2 rpm for starting wraps. Then, with a good speed control, it is easy to control the speed of the motor at every speed from the 1 rpm, on up to the 500 rpm maximum speed. All of this with a motor and gear train that is typically rather quiet.

If you wanted sources for parts or other help, just drop me an e-mail and I will see what I can do to help you with your project.

hflier@comcast.net

Take care