Re: Homemade litz with THHN wire?

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Original poster: "Mike" <mike.marcum@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

I tried it with smaller 36 awg magnet wire and will never attempt it again 
since if you try it with more than a 10-20' length you'll most likely end 
up with a mess. At the very least it's more time consuming than winding a 
1500T secondary by hand, especially if you're trying to build up to 8 awg 
(100's of strands). The trick is to make sure that each and every strand is 
on the outside surface of the cable equally without winding it too tight 
(increases length of individual strands and dc resistance).
As for 18 awg, dc and low freq losses would go down, but TC frequencies 
will make very little difference because the effective surface area of each 
conductor compared to it's diameter is not that much (the center of the 18 
awg won't carry much current, and the center of the whole cable won't 
either, which is why most largish pro litz is wound on a non-conductive 
core). You'd have a huge foot-thick cable that you couldn't do much with 
unless you were building an ALF-sized coil. For TC litz I wouldn't use 
strands bigger than 32 awg to make the cable manageable.

Mike
----- Original Message ----- From: "Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, January 30, 2005 11:38 PM
Subject: Homemade litz with THHN wire?


> Original poster: "Hydrogen18" <hydrogen18@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> Hi list,
> I use 8 awg stranded THHN copper wire for all my connections in my tesla 
> coil project. Given the high frequencies present on the primary coil, 
> would it be advantageous to buy a spool of 18 awg THHN and bundle it 
> together to make something similiar to litz wire or would I be wasting my 
> time? Has anyone attempted this?
>
> Eric