I love those pictures. Artistic looking even.
I've also had luck with touching wraps. Many disposable atties, such as Cisco spec, have the wire wound tight.
Funny you should say that... It was me trying to figure out why my 1.8 ohm Cisco attys got hotter, faster and with less power than my the 1.8 ohm coils I was wrapping by hand. I noticed that (among other things) that I didn't see any space between the coils.
I hear a lot of people say to make sure the wires don't touch and have a theory for that. My guess is that it does effect resistance, but if all the wraps touch it doesn't matter and they will heat evenly. If only one or two wraps touch and the rest are spaced the difference in resistance between the coil will create hot spots, so either have them all touch or none.
Pretty close. I've noticed that it has more to do with the "smoothness" of the coils. Any kinks or deformities seem to breed hotspots.
I can move the individual coils around creating small gaps without adversely affecting anything.
To test if touching wraps effect resistance someone could take 2 wires the same length, wrap one spaced and one touching, and test if the resistance reads different.
All you really need to do is measure the resistance of the wire before it's coiled and mark the termination points. I typically see a 0.1 to 0.15 ohm drop in resistance when coiled but I'm also rolling onto ss mesh so I'm sure that plays a role as well.
The "Peter K" style that eikon built would be the optimal platform to test with because it can be measured w/o the wick.