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Welsh Al
New Member
United Kingdom
4 Posts |
 Posted - Nov 29 2005 : 4:02:04 PM
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Hello. Nice place you have here :)
I want to continue riding my bike through the winter, but can't afford the £50 for heated gloves.
I have found some websites that describe how to make them, but i need some specifics.
I am a touch confused by the technical requirements, as you would expect of someone who is trained to work with wine!. You lot seem particularly clued-up, so I thought I thought i would beg your assistance.
Nichrome wire has been suggested, as it will be quite thin and so quite easy to attach to the thin cotton gloves that i will be using.
To get the heat into the glove (20ish watts) the wire has to be a certain length for a certain resistance value for a certain guage for a certain current at 12 volts, right?.
I know that the bike's electrics are 12 volts. I think it's 8amps. So it would be better to have the wire running up and down both sides of each finger, and about 12cm per finger per side, so 10 fingers x 2 sides each x 12cm per finger = 240cm of wire.
Round that off a bit to take account of the lead-in from the wrist and i think we'll use 300cm = 3m, 1.5m per hand.
So, i need to get about 20ish watts from 1.5m of wire. What gauge of wire would i need?. From some of the sites i've seen, it seems as if i need 16guage SWG wire.
This stuff is 1mm thick, right?. That means that when i wrap it with heat-shrinking cover, it's going to be about 2mm?.
I'm not too interested in controller switches to vary temperature, not yet anyway, so the only other concern would be an inline on/off switch and an inline fuse.
Some of the websites have talked about flex being used, like for a lamp?. I do happen to have a bedside lamp here that's got a bit of a taste for speed, i'm sure she wouldn't mind the sacrifice :).
So, if I solder bullet connectors to the flex, they will connect to a cigarette-lighter fitting that i can get cheaply and connect to the battery (so that if i walk away from the bike without dis-connecting myself, all i get is a ping not a morning's worth of reworking the wiring :} ) and i can use bullet connectors to go from the flex to the nichrome (which apparently won't solder?).
I can use an inline spade-type car fuse/holder, but what fuse should i put in there?. Some of the Gebring/Kant gloves apparently use between 1.5 and 2 amps; is that what my 1.5m of wire will use?.
Back to the basics, does the connection earth back to the battery or the frame?. Will earthing to the frame cause problems with the bike's earth?.
And if you are still with me, then thank you for your tenacity!.
Al.
Edited by - Welsh Al on Nov 29 2005 4:13:43 PM |
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Kale
Nobel Prize Winner
Canada
795 Posts |
Posted - Nov 29 2005 : 5:51:09 PM
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Nichrome wire is overkill for this. Just get some regular resistors and wire them in series, sewing them into the glove in strategic positions. You can buy extremely small resistors that will not bother your hands by being too large.
To figure out your requirements: First decide where you want the resistors to be in the gloves. I recommend using a large number of small ones to spread out the heating effect.
Your bike is a 12V system, so that will be the voltage you have to work with.
The amount of heat produced by each resistor will be P = I*I*R, that is power in watts equal to the current, squared, times the value of the resistor.
The current will be equal to I = V/R, that is Voltage divided by Resistance, where Voltage is 12 V, and R is the TOTAL RESISTANCE of the string of SERIES WIRED resistors. Note that you can wire multiple series strings together in parallel. Also, do not drop more than 0.125 W (or whatever they are rated for) on any single resistor.
Once you know what size resistor you want to use, it is fairly easy to buy them in bulk for very cheap.
Follow these instructions at your own risk though, as if you don't know what you are doing there is theoretically a burn hazard. I'm assuming you know a bit about basic circuits here.
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Welsh Al
New Member
United Kingdom
4 Posts |
Posted - Nov 29 2005 : 7:24:13 PM
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quote:
Just get some regular resistors and wire them in series, sewing them into the glove in strategic positions.
I can't have lumps and bumps in the gloves, as it's not just the resistors, but the joints as you link them all by wire.
Plus, they will always move about in the glove, so will lose their ability to spread heat where they are needed.
The reason i looked at wire, and why i suppose every other method mentions wire, is that it can spread the dissipated heat with minimal noticable physical impact, and yet resist the temptation to move. It'll also be more streamlined.
With all due respect to rosary beads, they wouldn't be great stuffed in my mittens :)
And no, i don't know anything about circuits that i haven't learned by burning through my thumbs messing about with 12v car and bike systems ;) which is why i'm at sea having to consider thermal resistance and earth-bonding requirements.
Thanks for the reply though.
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Kale
Nobel Prize Winner
Canada
795 Posts |
Posted - Nov 30 2005 : 12:43:23 PM
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I can't have lumps and bumps in the gloves, as it's not just the resistors, but the joints as you link them all by wire.
You can get some pretty tiny resistors these days, but I suppose depending on the gloves even small ones would be a bit annoying. Still, if the glove was fairly thick (I'm assuming you are starting with a pretty hefty glove here) and you use fine wire and very small resistors (3-4mm long, 1-2mm wide for some of the small ones I have seen) then it shouldn't be too much of a problem.
quote:
Plus, they will always move about in the glove, so will lose their ability to spread heat where they are needed.
That's why you have to turn the glove inside-out and sew them into place. Even nichrome wire will move around a bit.
quote:
The reason i looked at wire, and why i suppose every other method mentions wire, is that it can spread the dissipated heat with minimal noticable physical impact, and yet resist the temptation to move.
It's true that the wire is a better choice over all, but you might also want to consider the cost and the complexity. Also, you'll still have to figure out a way to run the wire thorugh the gloves and secure it in place. What ever you end up doing you'll probably have a date with needle and thread at some point. 
quote:
And no, i don't know anything about circuits that i haven't learned by burning through my thumbs messing about with 12v car and bike systems ;) which is why i'm at sea having to consider thermal resistance and earth-bonding requirements.
Heh. Had to put the disclaimer in there. We've had some interesting requests involving people and electricity on this forum before...
As for the nichrome, if you can get some at a reasonible cost, just look up the resistance per centimeter of the wire. You can treat each centimeter as a 'resistor' and do exactly what I said in my previous post. Make sure you test it before you put it in the glove; you don't want to burn yourself. I'd recommend running a few strands just hooked up to the battery. You may need a real resistor in series with the wire to 'throttle' it so it doesn't produce too much heat. You can leave that by the battery though so it doesn't have to be mounted in the glove. Get some strands, figure out the resistance per unit length, and wire up some test lengths and see what you get. TIP: if you end up running more than an amp thorugh a single strand, it's probably too much. (assuming you will have strands for each finger, and a few through the palm and back of the hand.)
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cirvin
Nobel Prize Winner
USA
1542 Posts |
Posted - Nov 30 2005 : 12:46:05 PM
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A normal wire will do fine woven through the golves. Besure to implement some sort of current limiting so that you don't burn yourself or damage the bike electrics. Use alot of wire because it isn't too good at generating heat.
You could use nichrome, though you might want to look up specifications on it to determin how much of it you need and what current to pass through it.
http://daxter12.topcities.com <Updated:July |
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Welsh Al
New Member
United Kingdom
4 Posts |
Posted - Nov 30 2005 : 5:55:56 PM
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OK, thanks all, I'll let you know if this comes to fruition.
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sergiosparks
Apprentice
Philippines
132 Posts |
Posted - Dec 04 2005 : 9:18:01 PM
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A Good source of fine long inexpensive nichrome wirw is a solderering iron but you would have to experiment on how much you will need
i mean lenght per twelve volts and compfortable temperature you want to achive.
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Heated gloves vs my electrical innocence
