The Coiling Gizmo is a fun little tool I picked up recently. It is used for making wire coils that can be used in jewelry making.

It’s really easy to use - you wrap some wire around the “eye” at one end of the winder, and push it into the base, then start turning the winder by its handle, and beautiful perfect coils of wire appear.

I was impressed by how well it worked when I tried it - I’ve done lots of coiling by hand, which takes forever (but in certain designs it is the only way to accomplish it) and I’ve tried other methods designed to be faster that didn’t really work for me.

For example: I tried using en electric drill with a mandrel, but I couldn’t get my drill to spin slowly enough. Wire went flying everywhere. Don’t try it at home, unless you are able to control your drill with a pressure foot & thus can have it spin super slowly. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then your drill is probably too fast.

I tried using a hand-crank drill, but I found I needed a third hand, so that didn’t work either. Maybe a hand-crank drill with a shape more conducive to being clamped to my workbench would have worked…

So I’m not saying this is the best or only way to coil wire, but - this tool made perfect coils, was easy for me to use, and coiled the wire quickly. It’s the best coiling method I’ve tried. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it only comes with two sizes of winders, so you are limited to those to sizes of coils.

I used 26g wire in my experiments, but you can use thicker or thinner wire - probably if you go thicker, it will be harder to get perfect coils, and at a certain thickness of wire, it will just get too hard to crank - I’m thinking 14g wire wouldn’t work too well, but 22g or 20g would probably be just fine.