Tattoo machine springs and things

Hello, today's topic is the coil

springs

of the

tattoo

music

machine

, okay, they are quite important, if you didn't have a spring, this little bit that goes up and down the truss rod would probably fall to the floor, so They serve a purpose, I'll explain a little bit about the different calibers, what they do and also a little bit about armor bars. I'll try to keep it, you know, pretty simple, no need to get too complicated now, first of all I'd like to say that this tool is great. I don't know where you would get them nowadays.

I don't know who sells them anymore. It is actually used to align the

springs

. Here's an old truss rod with some slightly rusty springs, but what do you do? Do you put the truss rod in there and when you're putting the springs in you can centralize them and before you do it all and then you just put everything in line? It makes life so much easier and also um and I used to I've used this on literally every front spring that I've installed on my

machine

s, so you would put a spring in there like that and then you would push down and that gives enough curvature to that spring.

Forward. Can you see there we go? so that bends the front spring enough that you need to maybe do a little more than that, there we go, that's exactly how I do it on all the machines I've built. Now let's start with a rear spring and I can get them in several gauges, but I just use them on all my machines. I've only used 18 gauge front springs because it's right there, like in the middle of everything I used to find. The 16 I used to find was a bit. too bouncy um and a 20 gauge I thought was a little too strong, too stiff actually and it put a little more effort and the coils needed a little more effort, a little more voltage, so it got hot sometimes. a little bit but you know what everyone has in their own way certain builders use different

things

now this is called rear spring rear spring main spring call it what you want this is what it looks like now some machines have a curve or a roll in them to give it the angle here, I'm just using this one as an example, so if you didn't have a curvature in the spring, it would just lay flat on the coils like that, so the spring, the actual flexing of the spring, makes the truss rod feels a little more like this now depending on how much actual bend you have in the spring depends on the power of the machine so this one obviously doesn't have much as you can see I've wound the contact screw back and it's but you can, you can put more, you can put a little more curvature in there if you need to.

The trick is on these now if you have a machine that has a rolled or folded back. spring, then Mickey Sharps, you know all these kinds of

things

, which all have a bent rear spring. Now the problem I found with that is that from day one that curve is wearing out. Now it might take, you know, it might take quite a while, but over time. It could be months, probably more like years, but as the years go by you will find that eventually the machine is not doing what you actually bought it for because the tension in the main spring in the rear spring has actually worn out from day one. using the machine because the bend is set on the spring and you are pulling it out and eventually it gets weaker and weaker and weaker and it no longer has the amount of tension that you need so then you need to get another rear spring and then You have to try to replicate the camber you had on that rear spring to make the machine do exactly what you wanted in the first place, however the way to fix this is pretty simple: you have a flat rear spring, but to use a spring flat rear, you should have an angle set up there, see that this piece here, this part on top of this parcel shelf, the spring shelf here has an angle, so when you have a flat rear spring instead of lying flat towards the coils , in fact it will point slightly upwards.

The obvious advantage of this is reliability because you are not pulling the camber out of the spring, but rather you are pulling the camber into the spring, so if, for example, in a few years you decide to replace the spring or if you unfortunately broke a spring, which doesn't happen that often actually when you use a flat rear spring, but say if that spring broke or maybe just rusted something. like so, then what you're going to have to do is put a new rear spring in there, but you don't have to worry about how much camber you put in it, just put the new spring in there because it's going to do exactly what you want.

I want, as long as you use the same gauge, now on all my machines I used 18 gauge front and rear springs and the reason for this is just what I explained. If something happens I can send people a new rear spring. In fact, you know, machines. I think I originally sold them with spare parts or certainly anything else. I am now shipping new and old stock that I have been selling lately. I sent a bunch of replacement springs with them. I have a couple thousand springs sitting around. I don't do anything here so I'd rather they were getting used to it and um yeah like I said you just snapped that spring in and it's going to do exactly what it did um from the day you bought it the springs are the same um for latest.

I have used identical rear springs for 15 years, I use the same gauge front springs, but they are different lengths. I'm going to explain that in a second, so now with the rear spring, if you have to bend it, you can I need to do that, you have to be very careful with that because you don't want to bend it too much, uh, because too much tension will put too much stress on the rear spring and the chair bar will rise. at a silly angle, you know we sit here somewhere and he, the coils are going to have a hard time getting that down, you're going to have to put a lot of voltage on the coils, the machine is going to overheat and it's just not like that. it's going to work fine so the best thing to do if you've installed a new rear mainspring and you have to give it a little twist and bend it let me show you how to do it so let's say for example this is the edge of a table , okay, it's not obvious, and then what you want to do is hold the spring and the truss rod like this and then put your thumb there to hold it down, put your finger under there and just bend. lift it up a little bit like this a little bit and then put it in the machine, let's take a look here, then you put it in your machine, do that up and that's quite a bit, you know, I put quite a bit of spring in that. probably not, it's not very good, right, but I'm just using this as an example, so I gave you your spring curvature.

This is, I've completely screwed up and that's wrong, but in fact, that's not the underarm bar for this machine, but you see where I'm coming from, so do it a little at a time until you're satisfied that the underarm bar armor is at the correct angle you are used to. You can always remove it and add a little more. What you really don't want to do is put too much in it and then have to take it out again because that will weaken the spring much faster if you have to bend it and then have to try to bend it the other way to get it out and then bend it again which will ruin a whole little and will reduce the life of the spring. let's quickly cover the front springs the front the front springs again I only used 18 gauge these are the ones I've used I mean I really hate those thin little things that some of these builders make they're just weak they break there are In my opinion no there's enough metal volume to make them durable and particularly good, as you can see here, I've bent that spring, we're going to bend this spring a little bit shorter, wait a second, so that's the one that's done, so they both have a fairly similar amount of curvature.

They both sit on top of each other. That's not so bad. They are right now, as you can see, one is shorter than the other. Alright, now the shorter one is going to work faster because the shorter the piece of metal is, the harder it is to flex, so when it comes up, let me show you a machine with a short spring when it goes up and hits the contact screw. because it's because it's shorter, let's show that by shortening the spring that way it moves back, there's less flex, so if that's the case, normally the shorter spring will be used for a liner and the longer spring for a shader because It is more flexible. to give it a little more bounce and you can put a little more tension so that when the spring touches the contact screw, you need it if you just touch the contact screw, it will run very smooth, there won't be a lot of tension. on that mainspring and some people like that, especially for um, you know, the black and gray shading you want it to run pretty smoothly, but if you want it to run pretty hard for the color packaging, then when the spring hits the contact screw, the truss rod rises a little. a little bit more and that's a little bit more, there's a little bit more tension there and that's not an unreasonable amount, it's not going to go up here or anything like that and that will actually give you a good amount of power for your packing of color or maybe even your liner, so, that's pretty general, uh, a shorter spring for the liner, a longer spring will be for shading, obviously there are exceptions to that rule over the years.

I have sold shaders to people when they are quite happy to line with them because they like it. I run slow, big, thicker lines and stuff like that, and that's fine, I'm just generalizing a little. There are also what they call hybrids, so I tend to carve the back of the truss rod a little, maybe use a front facing. The spring gives it a little speed, but it bounces a little more since there is a little more space behind the truss rod. Now when I say that space behind the truss rod, if I can point this out here, this space here between the back of the truss rod and the shelf where the spring sits, so that's the deflection of the spring. , that little gap there is where it basically flexes, since it's bolted on everywhere else now, if that gap is bigger, then you obviously have more room in that spring. to flex, that will extend the life of the spring and also make the machine bounce a little more, be a little more flexible and you can probably do more things with it just by adjusting the voltage and your spacing, I'm not going to go into the details of the space, the air gap and the contact gap just because everyone has their own favorite settings.

I'm not going to try to tell you how to set up your machine, you have to figure it out. for you, if you probably already have it, you should have done it, so that's okay, another thing to comment on is a little o-ring, remember those little rubber o-rings that you've sometimes been looking for, it either breaks or falls off. First of all, you don't know what it's there for, so if you run the machine, there's just a cheap truss rod and a horrible, thin little front oscillator, but that's going to really rattle, it's going to be really loud, it's going to be heard. of reverberating things like that and you put the O-ring in there, it just silences the machine, it effectively shortens the flexibility of this front spring, so it will actually speed up the machine, but if your machine comes in and you're happy with an O-ring in there, obviously that's the way you should always run it, so it's worth replacing them from time to time, somehow they go a little wrong, um and stuff like that, so quickly, uh, what else do you have? we have one just check the armor bar for you the difference in the armor bars look at this little one here I don't know if you can see that you should be able to see that is something like carved while I have another one here somewhere here is one that is completely normal, it is not carved, now the reason for this is that this truss rod is going to be lighter so it will naturally move faster, so people tend to carve them to align them quickly now, this type of rod of regular armor as we know, it's perfectly fine for the coating, it's a little bit heavier, so once this gets going and it shakes like this and it falls apart, um, a little bit of science takes care of the kinetic energy and all that kind of stuff, etc.

In theory, the heavier the truss rod, the harder the needle will hit the skin; However, that also matters how far the armor bar has to travel, how big your gap is, or how long your throw is, if you will, so the longer the throw. the more time the armor bar has to build up energy, and even though it travels probably over 100 times a second, it makes a difference. However, some of the really big, fat armor bars will just slow you down, they hit hard, but I personally don't think they're practical. I always used identical truss rods on all my machines.

There are about 800 machines I've built over the years and they all have the same thing. It's just that some of them I actually carved a little piece here just to make them a little more, let this rear spring be a little more flexible, give them alittle more space, especially on things like hybrid machines, right, I think I've covered it all. that's just a quick introduction a quick 17 minute introduction to springs what yes remember if you didn't have them your truss rod will just fall to the ground see you later