If I understand you correctly, that's good thinking. Inserting one of the mandrels for the coil jig (while cool) in the prepared coil works. The additional mass of the bit ......s ramp up as the unfired coil cures. Niiice.
Two downsides. Once it does (ramp up) and it can quickly since you've lowered the resistance substantially, you may "pop" one or both coils if you apply too much power, or too long. The other is you want to balance the firing of duals. It's been my experience that it's actually more work to pulse harden them separately, formed or strained.
But you're already thinking intuitively with this solution finding alternatives to what you've seen on the video. The common practice of forcefully yanking on coils to set them, shape or position them can totally distort them internally in terms of strain…as you recently discovered.
A similar technique uses distilled water. Keep a micro-dropper (metal dripper tip) handy as you dry burn or harden duals. A smidgen of a drop strategically placed on a hot point of the coil or end turn is usually enough to ...... over-heating there and allow the alt coil to catch up. In other words whether touching metal to coils while fired, using water, yankin at 'em…it's baby steps as these babies are delicate and fragile.
Strained coils, tension wound on as on the pin vise below…
Generally don't require much if any tweezing, hot point suppression or orientation of turns. They look just like the above out of the gate. Don't fire end turns first or middle out but evenly end-to-end. And if you chose a resistance (temperature) close to the point you enjoy won't likely ever go uncomfortably warm on you (unless vaped dry). They just glow to a nice uniform red point for up to 6 secs (longer if you add a turn, more mass) if you select a good balance for the atty.
Using strain you'll see more production from 24-guage. But I'd drop down to 3-3.2mm for slightly lower res. This you can do with a pin vise using ordinary drill bits which allow for a wide variety of temp targets. By this I don't just mean watts, but surface area which yields vapor! Balancing these.
You have a great atty with the deck on that Tsunami. Easiest to work with in terms of maintaining the strain you built with. Try a pin vise as I describe elsewhere. You can make and pulse (harden and oxidize) both spaced and contact (closed) coils with it in a fraction of the time with just a little practice. Then they just stay that way.
Good luck c4
Yeah, tried that, shoving a metal jig into the coil when pre-firing, but it sparked and/or 'too low resistance'. 'Duh' moment for me, I'm basically shorting a circuit. It only became possible to do that with a ceramic jig that's non conducting.
Successfully done it with my current setup, 24 ga, 10 winds on 35 diameter. Without shoving a jig, pre-firing would just cause both the end wires (the ones connected to the poles) to glow bright, and then snapped off. With a ceramic jig in the middle, it pre-fired slow but nicely.
Tried with dropping water a bit, but the water ended up boiling and shoots at my fingers (hot!). I was using an empty liquid bottle as the water container and dropper tho, so maybe the water drops from the nozzle were too big.
