I've got some specially sized 90 degree male 2.54mm headers for which I need to fully expose the pin and remove the black plastic joining structure.
This is because how they are to be used they need to be soldered on the "wrong" side where the plastic currently is as a means to mount together boards at an angle, only after mounting is it possible to take some angled supporting jigs away and solder the other side.
Ideally I'd solder one end of the header to one board, then strip away the plastic part, then place the board and the other board in the holding jig, then solder the "wrong side" from where the plastic must be removed, then take off the jig and finish up by soldering the "right side". But if absolutely necessary I could extract the header pins from the plastic frst and use other means to align them during the soldering to the first board of the two they join.
The trouble is I can't find a nice quick way to remove the plastic. I can remove it, but it takes ages and lots of effort and risks bending the header pin out of the desired 90 degree shape (which is necessary else I could just use plain pieces of stif wire).
Anything involving cutting it off takes a lot of work with side-cutters, coming in at funny angles time and again until enough plastic is gone to expose the header pin. And can only be done to lone header pins before any soldering is done to them, trying it in situ after the first soldering would mean the cutting would force header pins apart whilst the other ends were soldered fixed in to holes, and would bend or break something.
Trying to forcibly pull the plastic off has similar issues. Trying it a pin at a time for lone pins needs a lot more force than is easy to apply to such small places where snipe nosed pliers struggle to grip, and trying to tug on the plastic with one set of pliers and on the angled sction of the header with another set, is as likely to bend the pin as it is to liberate it from the plastic. And again, too brutal a process to do in situ after the first soldering, I'd be more likely to damage something than to remove the plastic.
Melting isn't too easy either, the plastic used is obviously designed to be somewhat fireproof and to char, and when trying to heat it with a soldering iron it leaves a terrible black gunk on whichever part of the iron touches it (I tried touching with the side of the hot barrel section of an iron to avoid getting the gunk on the tip). As doing the first soldering before this melting is the only way to be able to get the header pins held firmly whilst apply the iron heat to them this has to be done in situ. And it only therefore melts on the side of the header, after much iron prodding, which faces outwards and can be reached with the side of the iron's not-quite-tip-area. So the gunky remnants, which cool immediately in to something almost as solid as beforehand, need tugging off with quite a bit of force with pliers or cutting at with side-cutters some more.
I did this by a mixture of the means for enough header pins for my initial use, about half an hour to expose 8 pins and in the process wrecking 4 pins. But this is for a project which will later on need a fair few tens more of header pins stripping in this way.
Is there a nice easy and quick way to get the plastic off? Without having to try to find weird chemicals (most chemicals being more likely to dissolve metal pins than plastic surrounds anyway), and without processes more likely to bend the pins or damage the board than get the plastic off.
I am not looking for an alternative to these headers, as the metal curved piece is exactly the right shape and has the perfect length on both sides of the bend for joinging board at an angle in this scenario. And I doubt lone header pins without the plastic are sold with the same dimensions.
Thanks