Maybe I won't wind the coils so tight. The way I have been winding, I can barely slide the wick when I remove the needle.
When you say you are double back and twisting legs, are you using a non resistance wire for that or just doubling the resistance wire. I wonder if I can just double up on the resistance wire at the legs to increase the resistance. This way I don't have to waste the 100' roll of 32 gauge I have.
I was using strands of non-resistance speaker wire, basically splicing the resistance wire between two lengths of that by twisting them together and clipping the excess perpendicular twisted bit off. It's a bit of a pain, as you have to leave a fair amount of twist to keep them together, and that makes it hard to avoid shorts to the side metal.
What I mentioned above is just making the resistance wire a bit longer, then folding back the legs so that the end comes up to the coil, then twisting each doubled leg into a tight helix to ensure good contact between both strands of the leg. It actually lowers the resistance of the legs to half that of the coil, so they don't heat up much. This method makes the legs thicker than the other method, as they are twisted pairs instead of a single strand, so it displaces the seal a bit more when putting it together. It works well, though, if you can keep from accidentally unwinding the legs while you are turning the coil.
If you want to use the 32 gauge for that, It'd probably work either way, but the first method would still have fairly hot legs unless you spliced doubled 32 gauge to the 34 gauge.
