you are right it is resistive and that means that they may have brazed it and it explains the ceramic part. I wish i drilled it before destroying it. Or it could have been crimped.
I am very suspicious its brazed since they had ceramic there.
I suppose it would be as simple as putting a small tube in there, then swaging it on both ends. And then hit it with like a micro flame...
Now that i renembered the center conductor is a bastard to solder, i feel alot better about just buying the part lol I forgot about the resistive probe wires and it started to look like lunacy.
But there is one interesting repair possibility, to thread it through, put a dash of epoxy in there to hold it, then spot weld a copper strip to the end. But its kinda janky IMO.
Since I have the 10 feet of cable I can try to spot weld it to see what happens for curiosity.
Oh I actually probed it. The star shaped thing, I thought that was adhesive or some kind of residue because its dirty, there is acutally copper still there. Its like a nautical star/flower in 3d thats cut in half so its hollow that is made of copper and sunk into the ceramic.
I can try to fix it. Might be faster to repair this probe then I thought, good place to start electronics spot welding experiments on. But I would still need to guess about which collar and crimp tool to use on the braid and do alot of research on what connector could be canibalized without risking the crimp tool.
My best idea so far:
1) crimp a center conductor off a fitting coaxial connector to the center wire with a 4 indent crimp.
2) put solder paste on the bottom of the crimp and pull the wire into the swaged copper tube on the inside of the ceramic flower shape
3) heat for melting, also melting a preform and a loop of wire to the center pin. Or use a too small copper center pin like a SMA interior, and just solder it into the tube after crimping, and stick a wire into the receptacle end of the center pin and solder it again.
I have my doubts about getting a good crimp on the nichrome wire though, if you just guess on a random center pin to use as an anchor. Probobly not worth the effort and I don't want some obvious point of failure to possibly read a high voltage circuit as de energized. I know that the probe should not be the primary means of verification of the presence of high voltage, but it just seems like its removing a possibly contingency.
If it was anything but a 20KV probe I would try the repair out.
I think for a HV probe, a dodgy connection point that is in series with the measurement equipment is the worst, because you can disable it to the point of failing to detect HVDC, which is quite 'broken'. And this probe cable is kind of stiff and shitty anyway, the one I got looks alot less degraded.
But for those interested, the inside of the probe has a hair thin single strand as the center conductor. The AWG is really small. I think it might be thinner then a braid wire. Fuck dealing wiht that