In poking around McMaster Carr, they seem to have some steel wire. I may be on my own in suppying this to the manufacturer.

http://www.mcmaster.com/#carbon-steel-wire/=9fjuax

Does anyone know much about 'black oxide' coating? Initial research thinks it might work ok. BTW, former constructions I did were with annealed. I hope to never use it again due to its extreme stiffness.

Jeanna,
Annealed did work and worked well in my 1st 2 NS coils. But it was an absolute bear to handle, especially when simultaneously trying to wind with copper. I eventually went to winding just copper onto a layer - covering with cloth - and then winding annealed so that it wedged itself between the coppers. It worked alright but I honestly never want to go back to winding this way. It was a messy way to construct. Another disadvantage was tremendous spring tension present. I had to really be careful in order to keep things pulled tight, otherwise it would unravel itself quite easily. Nope, no more annealed iron for me. 

So I'm to the point of fiberglass covering both copper and non-annealed iron, and then winding in a more sane fashion. As stated in prior posts, I'll be using a fairly thick insulation layer of battery separator between the layers. My intent is to keep localized fields between the Fe+Cu wires organized and residing in their own layers. My former wild / unorganized coils were obviously all over the place in regards to any possible field aspects of windings themselves. Maybe being super-tidy will have no effect, but I will at least try and eliminate the possibility.


Laser,
Seeing that you have coils to immediately work with, pulse a DC current into the iron windings only and look for any observable results in the copper. There should be something happening there because of varying field in the iron wire sitting right next to the copper. There are many other offshoot experiments that could be done along these lines. My thought is, the primary can stand alone for heavy power production.

@ IotaYodi,

The bag of butts is a great idea, I will look for them. Utilux springs to mind.

Not a very high iron content. Off hand I would say no.
 You can buy uninsulated butt connectors from magnet wire size to service entry size. A bag of 25 of Awg 16 to 12 sizes is about $4.00 us. When crimped right there hard to pull off. 

The magnetic field of the core runs north and south which puts the field perpendicular or 90 deg to the copper and iron windings. What affect would there be if you coiled the "insulated" iron wire around the copper wire then wind that on the core? The iron magnetic field would be going north and south along with the core in this manner. I would think there would be more amps produced this way.
Anyone have any insights or knowledge on this?

Your proposed question on the magnetic field is very interresting if it could be done, I'm not saying it can't, it would be difficult.

Is this what you mean, winding the iron wire so it's length lies in line with the lines of magnetism which flows from pole to pole, as I have draw it below?

jim

3470 = The stubblefield long bolt end to end with the magnetic lines of force flowing from end to end but all around it.
3480 = Showing 1 single turn of a single strand of copper wire (a loop) with many turns around this loop made of iron or steel wire.

The lines of force passing through the horizontal turns of iron wire.
I can imagine hundreds of loops all in a single strand of copper wire.
Instead of a bifilar wind it would be a loopy wind, is there another word to describe this procedure?

A bit like a guitar base string wound around the iron bolt, the copper wire would have to be insulated first though, oh boy when we think this coil is nailed another version comes along.

Please remember, we need to get a original working coil to compair the different coils against.

Jim:

Looks like a good joint to me.  Did you by chance check the resistance of the 2 wires joined before your joint that you made?  I am not saying it will make any difference....probably not but, this thought just occurred to me after reading your post.

You can braze the steel wire together but, this requires that you heat them to "cherry" red which will take more than a propane torch.  We used to mount our ultrasonic drills in this manner.  I used acetylene (no oxygen) for this to get the heat required.

I really admire your ability to keep going after a short.  I still have a Jeanna circuit in my bin that had a short somewhere and I have still not messed with it.  God only knows where the short is and I did/do not have the patience to find out.

Great work Mate.

Bill

MW thanks for the info!
 That is correct on the drawing. My thinking was just iron on top of the copper wire. Plus doing the iron wire alone. It would be hard to do without a machine. A bass guitar string machine might be able to do it. A way to keep the coils tight together would be needed. Pvc insulation would work but possibly not with this coil. If its never been done it would be a first. I just dont know the physics behind it but perhaps someone can enlighten us. I guess a short length could be done by hand for experimentation.

And here is a cross sectioned model of the coil. This very difficult to work with on my machine, crashes or takes forever. And that is on a brand new Dell cad station w/ i7 cpu, etc... I need to find a less stressful way to model this damn thing.

At any rate, it looks suspiciously like the cross section in the patent. It should be noted that this is bifilar wind (see previous pictures) It should be further noted that dimensionally, each wire is .048" + .012" fiberglass = 0.060" total diameter. So keep this in mind when looking at the wires that appear in direct contact. Both copper and iron therefore insulated. Due to constant computer crashes, I was not able to color code things or model up wire + insulation seperately.

smaller picture shows a bundled iron core stuffed in.

In general, I'm a firm believer that an organized construction will provide solid magnetic field gains via proper localized relationships. Some of my original posts last year hinted at this but now that I look at the 3d models, I am becoming convinced. Thus my interest in insulating both wires so that windings can come out just like my pictures. I still think insulation thickness between layers plays a part in local field games happening here. I guess what I will do is build a simple 2 layer coil having different insulation (battery separator) thickness and see how far I need to get layers away from each other for best results. A magnetic field expert (not me) needs to perform a layout on how things will work in organized coil construction. Opinions welcome on this subject...

Enjoy...

Computer = Dell Precision T1500. 2.8Ghz i7, 4GB RAM, 64bit OS and 64bit Solidworks. I'm not computer expert, just use to run CAD.

So here are some colorized pictures and a little picture of field lines in a coil. I see this representative for the iron windings. Copper would have the same but it will get pounded by the stronger Iron based field. There would be opposition and overall weirdness in my opinion. This assuming both iron and copper running same polarity. Should Tishitang's logic be applied, run copper in one polarity and iron in opposite polarity, now the game gets real interesting. He has various diagrams and texts that talk these theories through. There are other theories out there that are similar. A proper coil construction would enable one to easily test all of them. And that is where I am quickly headed.

Cheers

Not sure if this has been brought up yet, so sorry if a repeat. In looking at patent figures further there can be seen various inconsistencies in the representation of primary windings.

Figure 2 seems to agree with my modern CAD from bottom 2/3 coil standpoint.
Figure 3 quite different from either Figure 2 or modern CAD.
Figure 3 wire ends on one side does not agree with number of winds (assuming one continuous wind in down/up/etc... fashion)

So are figures just figurative then? 

I have built coils with one wire that went down/up/etc... This is highest resistance way to wind these things. I would tend to think that there are magnetic field implications with this winding method. (scamble winding seems preferred in secondaries but do we want it in primary?) I have produced CAD that indicates all same wind direction that could easily be wired in a parallel fashion (lowest resistance). In fact I have built small coils this way that were indeed stronger in field and electrical output. 4 wires would still exist, 2 per end of coil.

So forget patent drawings...What makes sense to do? Scamble wind multiple layers with single wire OR a more structured approach? From a field standpoint, what makes the most sense? Any opinion welcome....


Perhaps winding method means little, or effects efficiency to a small degree only? I guess I still lean toward having a uniformly structured system.... I am doing more cad that is based on cross sectional view and field lines. Should give a brief view of what is happening in this coil. I studied many magnetic field photographs for different coils and it is quite facinating to see both localized fields as well as global fields in these pictures. Also re-read induction, self induction properties. If I remember right, NS coil described as high self inductive with low resistance. It is obvious this coil has high self induction. Everything packed tight and next to each other, ferrous core present, ferrous windings, etc... We can wire for lower resistance. Maybe that is the extent of what we need to worry about in the primary.