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DIY Stompboxes => Building your own stompbox => Topic started by: ode2no1 on August 04, 2014, 02:00:37 AM

Title: will this inductor work in a wah?
Post by: ode2no1 on August 04, 2014, 02:00:37 AM
http://www.taydaelectronics.com/inductors/560uh-inductor.html

may be a dumb question, but i'd never seen this sort of inductor before and wondered if it would work...regardless of whether or not it would sound as good as an actual wah inductor.
Title: Re: will this inductor work in a wah?
Post by: psychedelicfish on August 04, 2014, 02:20:50 AM
That inductor is 560uH. In wah pedals we normally use ~500mH inductors. The inductor you linked is 1000 times too small.
Title: Re: will this inductor work in a wah?
Post by: ode2no1 on August 04, 2014, 02:57:26 AM
ah...duh. thanks for pointing that out. are there any practical uses for small inductors in pedals?
Title: Re: will this inductor work in a wah?
Post by: armdnrdy on August 04, 2014, 03:54:58 AM
http://www.diystompboxes.com/smfforum/index.php?topic=107370.0
Title: Re: will this inductor work in a wah?
Post by: Seljer on August 04, 2014, 04:12:14 AM
Quote from: ode2no1 on August 04, 2014, 02:57:26 AM
ah...duh. thanks for pointing that out. are there any practical uses for small inductors in pedals?

Such a small inductors is represents a very high impedance to radio frequencies. So you can you it to stop any radio frequency noise from entering (or exiting) in places where you don't want it. Add it in series with the power supply to help the capacitors with the filtering (or to separate the supply for a ticking LFO in a phaser/chorus from the rest of the circuit). Or in series with the input if you have a fuzz for example that's picking up radio stations.
Title: Re: will this inductor work in a wah?
Post by: PRR on August 04, 2014, 10:04:06 PM
Inductive reactance is Henries times Frequency time 6.28.

A 560 micro-Henry coil, times 20,000 Hz (extreme high audio), times 6.28 is only 70 Ohms. Closer to the guitar band, 2KHz, just 7 Ohms. This is a silly-small value for most audio circuits.

Also that coil has 12 Ohms of simple resistance, so the extra 7 Ohms of inductance hardly matters.

And it has a maximum current of 85mA (0.085A), so it won't work in 8 Ohm speaker circuits which must pass several Amps.

As you see from inpedance going up with frequency, coils make a lot more sense at HIGH frequency. There's good MHz uses for a 560uH coil. For audio we need BIG Henries, which costs a lot more than the 8 cents quoted for this part.