How hard can it be to create your own inductors? Get a wire. Coil it up. Right? Well, the devil is definitely in the details, and [Nick] wants to share his ten tips for building “the perfect” inductor. We don’t know about perfect, but we do think he brings up some very good points. Check out his video below.

If you are winding wire around your finger (or, as it appears in the video, a fork) or you are using a beefy ferrite core, you’ll find something interesting in the video.

Of course, the issue with inductors is that wires aren’t perfect, nor are core materials. Factors like this lead to inefficiency and loss, sometimes in a frequency-dependent way.

It looks like [Nick] is building a large switching power supply, so the subject inductor is a handful. He demonstrates some useful computational tools for analyzing data about cores, for example.

We learned a lot watching the tricks, but we were more interested in the inductor’s construction. We have to admit that the computed inductance of the coil matched quite closely to the measured value.

Need a variable inductor? No problem. Before ferrite cores, good coils were a lot harder to wind.