Anatomy of a Tattoo Gun

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Doc and I'm going to be describing the anatomy of a tattoo machine. The first thing you notice is you got the frame is this outer part. It forms the body of the machine. And then it's got two coils here, and it's just a piece of steel down the core that's wrapped by copper wire and these, they are wrapped to different thicknesses. This is wrapped, ten wraps deep. In tattooing generally the coils are wrapped from anywhere from six to ten wraps. And usually they use two coils. They are connecting together with a capacitor that acts to reduce the current to smooth out the energy flow. And then an armature bar, that when you attach a power supply, in this case it's a twelve volt power supply. It creates an electromagnet and causes this armature bar to move up an down. When that contacts electricity, the coil sucks the bar down and when it breaks the contact up here, then it's not a magnet anymore and the spring, springs it back up to do that again and that process repeats three thousand times approximately every minute. The needle portion is an eyeless sewing needles makes the tattoo needles. This one you probably can't see but it's three needles all packed together. And then they are soldered down to this long bar which we drop down to the what we call the handle part, we call it tube. And inserts into the machine this way. And a couple of rubber bands act as a tensioning device to stop the needle from bouncing around."