T-REX BINSON UPDATE #3
Summer’s just around the corner here in Denmark. Us Danes always get a little giddy when sunrays take over from what seems to be an eternal solar eclipse, so we felt like celebrating the coming of spring by showing you our newest acquisition. Don’t ask where Lars got it from or how much we paid for it. The seller said “I think it still works…”. Lars said “okay, I trust you”.
Feast your eyes on this piece of… uhm… machinery. It can wind wire on stuff. Much like a pickup winder, only it does the opposite of “scatter wound”. It can be adjusted so that the chosen wire is wound with no gaps in between the windings. Swiss made in the early 60’s by “Meteor”, this winder is still going strong. It even has a power outlet made of Bakelite on a small wooden frame. That outlet was definitely not made for an iPhone charger, that’s for sure. The whole thing looks like a cross between a WW2 lie detector, an air balloon sewing machine and something out of a “Saw” film.
The Swiss made, foot-operated winding machine is in the house!
Mohamad has calibrated it to the 0,1mm thickness of the wire we use, and guess what?
It works!
It even stops by itself when exactly 27,5 meters of wire has been wound onto the drum.
That’s it, huh? Nope. Then you´ll need to grind the winding. Grinding the wire makes it a lot easier for the heads to transfer audio to the drum, because the combined “wire area” is enlarged. Like if you use a paint roller instead of a brush to paint your house. More paint per stroke, right?
Lastly, the wire is secured on each end and “potted” in lacquer that cures after 4 hours in an oven at 140 degrees Celsius.
Baking the wire in the oven!
Done. We have something we can use now. That’s not to say that sound clips are up in a few days. This winder (and a lot of communication with the guys that grind the wire down to an unfathomably low tolerance) is a tool for research and development. When we know that things work, we need to look for ways to do this on a large scale. Hopefully, we’ll need to make more than just a handful of drums. Maybe this old Pride of Switzerland will be put through its paces when the time comes. We’ll see.
We hope you dig the DIY content as much as we do!