Random tip of the day--wire stripping fine stranded cables

[IanB]

If you ever have multi-stranded wire to strip and you try to use standard wire strippers or a knife, then no matter how careful you are, you will usually find a bunch of copper strands get cut or break off and come away with the insulation. This is very annoying if you are a perfectionist and you don't want that to happen. Or if you keep attempting a perfect termination and your wire gets shorter and shorter with repeated attempts...

The solution, if you don't have an expensive heated wire stripper, is to use the blade tip on a soldering iron. You can roll the wire on a hard surface and melt through the insulation with the hot blade without any danger of breaking the copper strands. The insulation will easily slide off the end of the wire leaving a perfectly exposed length of copper strands ready for soldering or crimping.

[BravoV]

Use only dodgy, cheap or bad/discarded solder tips, other wise certain melted insulation materials will be very corrosive to the metal when they're in melting state, and will corrode the tip really bad and fast.

[Skimask]

Use only dodgy, cheap or bad/discarded solder tips, other wise certain melted insulation materials will be very corrosive to the metal when they're in melting state, and will corrode the tip really bad and fast.

In other words, anything from Radio Shack...

[IanB]

Use only dodgy, cheap or bad/discarded solder tips, other wise certain melted insulation materials will be very corrosive to the metal when they're in melting state, and will corrode the tip really bad and fast.

You can get a dedicated knife-edge solder tip and reserve this solely for cutting insulation and other plastic melting duties.

[orbiter]

If wire strippers are too heavy duty for the fine wires, I tend to roll the wire on a flat surface but with a scalpel blade gently against the wire.

[IanB]

If wire strippers are too heavy duty for the fine wires, I tend to roll the wire on a flat surface but with a scalpel blade gently against the wire.

Yes, I've tried that. But with some wire coverings it doesn't quite seem to work. If the blade stops short of the copper strands, then I have to bend the wire to break the last bit of insulation. If the insulation is really stretchy and rubbery then the bending required will break some copper. But if I let the blade go deeper then it will tend to nick and break some copper strands anyway.

Clean wire stripping seems to be a particular problem with fine stranded flexible wire that has soft, rubbery insulation, like speaker wire for instance.

[Odysseus]

I will have to add this trick to my toolbox.

In the past, I've always had good success with scoring while the cable is bent at a tight radius to stress the insulation.  It will cut through long before the blade reaches the copper.

'Twas the way me pappa showed me.

[JuKu]

Don't inhale the fumes.

[M. András]

ive stripped rc type silicon wires 14awg with a knipex self adjusting stripper and didnt even brake a 0.08 strand in the last 20 times when i used that wire for making test leads

[amyk]

I use sharp scissors to score a groove around, but not through, then grab the end and twist it - breaks off the insulation and leaves the strands nicely wound.

[chhrisedwards]

If you ever have multi-stranded wire to strip and you try to use standard wire strippers or a knife, then no matter how careful you are, you will usually find a bunch of copper strands get cut or break off and come away with the insulation. This is very annoying if you are a perfectionist and you don't want that to happen. Or if you keep attempting a perfect termination and your wire gets shorter and shorter with repeated attempts...

The solution, if you don't have an expensive heated wire stripper, is to use the blade tip on a soldering iron. You can roll the wire on a hard surface and melt through the insulation with the hot blade without any danger of breaking the copper strands. The insulation will easily slide off the end of the wire leaving a perfectly exposed length of copper strands ready for soldering or crimping.

Thanks for the suggestion, @IanB. As this post is of 2013, by the time, technology and processes have changed a lot. Laser wire stripping is becoming very popular because it gives the more precise and accurate cuts without any damage.

[aargee]

Difficult for Silicone wires, but a good idea for PVC, pre shrinks the insulation too before soldering or terminating.

[Sceadwian]

I've never tried it because ironically I'd gotten rid of my solder pot a month before someone suggested this but dip the wire into a lead pot that's heated up as hot as you can get it with the ends dabbed in flux. It's probably more hassle than it's worth and I'm not even sure how well it works. Only thing I've done is torch the ends and polish with very fine sand paper and flux well.

[Bratster]

One thing to keep in mind when dealing with fine stranded wire is the size increase.

Take a 14 awg wire for example if you do 14 awg solid versus
 14 awg stranded
versus 14 awg find stranded
you actually need a slightly different stripper for each.

I had some strippers at work that one side was stamped for solid wire and the other side was labeled for stranded wire, the difference just the scale being offset by 1.

Like so:

12 solid=14 stranded
14 solid=16 stranded
16 solid=18 stranded
Etc

And even with the fine stranded wire if you compare more or less standard fine stranded to something like a silicone jacketed super fine stranded,
it will be even bigger yet so you may have to jump two sizes to be able to strip it safely.



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[Sceadwian]

Except you can't use wire strippers on this kind of wire at all anyways, it's litz wire, each individual strand is enameled. Hence you have to burn it off. That's why it's such a pain in the neck,

One thing to keep in mind when dealing with fine stranded wire is the size increase.

Take a 14 awg wire for example if you do 14 awg solid versus
 14 awg stranded
versus 14 awg find stranded
you actually need a slightly different stripper for each.

I had some strippers at work that one side was stamped for solid wire and the other side was labeled for stranded wire, the difference just the scale being offset by 1.

Like so:

12 solid=14 stranded
14 solid=16 stranded
16 solid=18 stranded
Etc

And even with the fine stranded wire if you compare more or less standard fine stranded to something like a silicone jacketed super fine stranded,
it will be even bigger yet so you may have to jump two sizes to be able to strip it safely.



Sent from my Fi Moto x4 using Tapatalk

[Bratster]

Except you can't use wire strippers on this kind of wire at all anyways, it's litz wire, each individual strand is enameled. Hence you have to burn it off. That's why it's such a pain in the neck,

One thing to keep in mind when dealing with fine stranded wire is the size increase.

Take a 14 awg wire for example if you do 14 awg solid versus
 14 awg stranded
versus 14 awg find stranded
you actually need a slightly different stripper for each.

I had some strippers at work that one side was stamped for solid wire and the other side was labeled for stranded wire, the difference just the scale being offset by 1.

Like so:

12 solid=14 stranded
14 solid=16 stranded
16 solid=18 stranded
Etc

And even with the fine stranded wire if you compare more or less standard fine stranded to something like a silicone jacketed super fine stranded,
it will be even bigger yet so you may have to jump two sizes to be able to strip it safely.



Sent from my Fi Moto x4 using Tapatalk

You are correct, but I wasn't talking about litz wire or enameled wire.

And unless I missed it I don't see anybody else either.

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[Zucca]

My first and 10 years old 30W JBC iron never gives up, now his only job is to melt plastic.

[KL27x]

I use a homemade thermal wire stripper for exactly this kind of thing. I wouldn't really share this, as crummy as it sounds, except for the fact it is awesome AND that it still works, perfectly, ten years later.

It's just a pair of "tweezers" made by gluing two strips of wood to a small block of wood at one end as a spacer, to form a pair of wooden tweezers. Then this is hotsnotted to the side of a single 18650 li ion battery. That's the basic mechanicals. You squeeze, and the jaws of the tweezers close. The ends are angled about 30 degrees from square.

Now for the magic. It's two bits of thin nichrome wire. The exact gauge is 27AWG / 0.0142" diameter. Alloy is KA1. It has to be really thin AND long enough, else the battery wouldn't be powerful enough, right? So to get this thin wire strong enough, structurally, I looped it through a bit of protoboard to give it a jaw shape AND to give it more length. So you see, you loop it through a 2 hole gap in the protoboard on the plain side. Then on the copper side, you loop it back one hole, then on the plain side you loop it forward 2 holes, again. So you get two loops of wire 2 holes wide, but they are overlapped by one hole. So you have two overlapping semicircles of wire that cross with a wee bit of height off the board, enough height to cut through a wire insulation. Then you solder two pins behind these jaws, extending out the copper side for terminal posts, and you wind the ends of the wire around these posts.
 
For the other jaw, you do the same thing, but you have to make sure that when the loops cross each other, they are going to lock with the other jaw, so ... the top left loop/half-jaw will slide in front of the top right loop/half-jaw. But the bottom left loop/half-jaw will slide behind the bottom right loop/half-jaw.

Then you glue these to the insides of the end of the wooden tweezers.

I use just a simple DIY contact switch, using a solder blob and a piece of thin, flexible copper clad. And there's also a slide switch in series (for a safety). There's also an LED in parallel, just for visual indicator so you know when power is being applied.

When you wire the two jaws, you have to make sure the polarity is such that the flow goes through each jaw, not jumping from one jaw to the other, of course. So
 the top of each jaw must both be positive and the bottom of each jaw negative, or vice versa. And to reduce the wire clutter, I used a strip of veroboard glued to the outside of each tweezer half to carry the current.

So you put the wire in, you squeeze the tweezers together, then you shift your thumb to hit the contact switch. The LED comes on, one second later you can feel the tweezers melt through the insulation and close tighter, then you rock your thumb back to let off the power. Then you twist and remove the end of the insulation.

When you get too much insulation bits stuck in the jaws. You just give it a pulse for a second and remove the blob with tweezers. EZ peezy.

Fits the palm of your hand.

The guy I am today wonder where this dude went, because he was pretty smart.

[Zucca]

pictures? Please

[KL27x]

Me? Random pics in no particular order.

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It looks like a really small capacity, but it works fine on even thicker (like 20 or 18 awg) wires as long as the insulation isn't ridiculous thick. We're talking for stripping individual wires, not cable/sheaths or power cords.