Detailed guide on how to make springs

A very comprehensive guide on spring making, from Dave Silberstein. 62 pages, and includes resources for sourcing springs and springmaking material, as well as various designs for springmaking tools.

How to Make Springs

Excellent resource Jon!! I didn't read the whole thing but skimmed through it...well done Mr. Dave Silberstein!! I've had to have a few custom ones made that were not off the shelf applicable for production units as well as make a few over the years. It takes a fair amount of fingering to get there, either to make them or the specificity to have them made. I also was thrilled to see all the tools and tips for making them. This document appears to give you all you need in one document!

Most Excellent and grateful for the post! ~PJ

Thanks! That's a lot of useful info in a nice organized format.

Thanks, I printed it for future reference. It is sure to come in handy, probably many times.

I paged through, but didn't read closely, the book Jon recommended and, while it seems a comprehensive treatment of the subject, I didn't see any mention of how to calculate the size of the mandrel on which the spring is wound.

Such a mandrel must have a diameter less than the desired ID of the finished spring since, due to spring-back, the spring diameter will increase once removed from the mandrel.

Kozo Hiraoka, a master builder of miniature live steam locomotives, studied the subject of mandrel sizing in depth and developed a set of equations for use by the DIY spring maker. His work was published in Home Shop Machinist, July/August 1987, pg. 30.

I converted his graphs and equations to computer code and developed a program to calculate mandrel size. Here's an example of the output...

----------------------------------------------
Kozo Hiraoka's SPRING WINDING MANDREL DIAMETER CALCULATION

Wire type: music wire [0] or phosphorus bronze (1) [0] ?
Wire diameter [0.04 in] ?
Spring inside diameter [0.203 in] ?

Recommended mandrel diameter = 0.180 in
----------------------------------------------

The program, MANDREL, is available for free on my page, the URL for which is in my sig.

Are any of you able to connect to the various links embedded in the document, particularly earthlink? Mine all seem to come up dead

I can manipulate those equations into Excel but was hoping for some simple online calculators. Again, that link seems to go nowhere. Some of the spring manufacturers calculations I've found on my own are not bad, but after inputting the usual parameters (OD, wire size, coils, length...) they seem more orientated to direct you to their (sales) offerings, more like a database lookup system.

Attachment 21493Attachment 21494

In a situation like that, search for an old archived version of the page. At Archive.org, enter in the url in the top "Wayback Machine" search box, to see all of the times it's been archived. Then check the archived versions, maybe one per year, until you find one from before that url disappeared. The calendar will show an orange circle if the archive attempt ended in a 404 error ("resource not found"). So keep going back until you find a blue circle date. The most recent one of those is generally your best bet.

So, in this case, it will lead you to something like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20121017...resources.html

For earlier disappeared stuff, try the Google Cache.

And if you want to create a web archive of a page that you think might go offline, just enter the url at Archive.is. Obviously, you can always just save a webpage to your computer, but Archive.is provides a third-party easily-accessed copy.

Very useful tip, thanks!