wire straightner?!?

[GreenTeam]

Does anyone have any simple designs for a magnet wire straightener? As most of my mats come from other motors, my wires are all full of little beds and stuff. It reduces my fill count considerably. Especially for the sizes I am working with. Ive seen some models that use bearings, do they work? how many do I require?
If anyone can help it would be soooo nice!

[SparWeb]

This might not work as well as you want it to...  Pull too hard and it will strip the insulating coating off the surface of the mag wire, making it useless.
Two sets of rollers, in pairs that are pressed together to get a good grip.  I suggest wood for some softness on the coating.  Pass the wire through one pair of rollers and out with a 90 degree turn so that the wire has to be in contact with a roller for a 1/4 turn.  coming out, go through a second pair of rollers much the same way.  This time, the roller point in a direction 90 degrees to the first pair of rollers, so that they can roll out kinds that were not rolled out by the first pair.

What comes off of a contraption such as that will want to curl up so you might as well be winding it onto a spool as you pull the wire through.  To get some tension in the rollers you'll need to have some friction on them.  That's what I can come up with off the top of my head but how well it works depends entirely on little subtle decisions and choices you would make as you build this machine.

[Mary B]

measure length needed. Attach one end to something solid that won't move. Wrap other end around a screwdriver handle and pull. Simple way to starihten lighter wire(I did this with 10AWG by using my lawn mower as the puller!)

[GreenTeam]

I been thinking that maybe some large bearings somehow attached to a length of board.
About 12-18 inches long, and somehow install bearings onto it so they can freely spin.
And stagger them so its like a zig zag line
and pull the wire through the bearings, hopefully, the enamel wont scrape off.
Make sense? Would this work?

[bigrockcandymountain]

Straightening mig wire to make nice gas filler rod you just stretch it tight chuck one end in a drill and give it a spin.  The twisting makes it very straight. 

[SparWeb]

GreenTeam,
That looks like a great idea!

[GreenTeam]

GreenTeam,
That looks like a great idea!

Thank you!

[Adriaan Kragten]

When I was about 45 years younger, I have designed a copper wire stretcher for about 1 mm nickel plated copper wire. The wire came from a big roll and so it was curved which wasn't allowed for the use of the wire. Finally we end up with a machine with three pairs of stretching wheels. The outside of each wheel had a groove with the same radius as the wire. The middle set of wheels pushed rather hard against the wire and because of this pressure, there was some plastic deformation of the wire at the contact point. The first and the third set of wheels were pushing only slightly. So there is some slip at the first and at the third set of wheels. The speed of the first set of wheels was about 95 % of that of the second set of wheels. The speed of the third set of wheels was about 105 % of the second set of wheels. Because of the speed difference, the wire is pulled at both sides out of the point of plastic deformation. This procedure resulted in a wire which was perfectly straightened. The wire was finally cut into short parts by a set of rotating cutting wheels which was placed after the third set of stretching wheels. The goal was twenty cut wires per second but the prototype could easily turn at a very high number of hundred cut wires per second.

[SparWeb]

One of those mass-production machines that your eye cannot follow except with a high-speed camera.