I used to use a gun that was fully automatic using Slit-Wrap.
I tried the Slit-Wrap but it never worked for me. IIRC the wrap tool was supposed to slit the insulation of the wire but wasn't intended to remove the insulation completely. When you wrapped the wife on the post, the wire was supposed to make contact with the post through the slit in the insulation. More often than not, it never did. I was using the hand tools and not an automatic system so YMMV.
I also tried another WW system were you wrapped the wire onto the post, insulation and all, and then you soldered the wire and it was supposed to melt the insulation and metal conductor would then contact the post. But all it did was make a burnt gummy mess! I think it was called Solder-Wrap or something like that.
"A friend of mine had worked on some WW boards that were put into space. "
I didn't know that they ever put any WW stuff into space. I've seen a lot boards that were built to go into space but never any WW ones. One friend of mine landed a job at KSC re -soldering boards intended to go into space with lead based solder instead of the RHOS crap that they were originally built with.
Several friends of mine were part of the group that designed and built the AMSATs. I was an engineer on one missile system that went into space, but only as part of it's ballistic trajectory. I was also an engineer on another that would have been space based but I can't really talk about either of those. I was offered a job at NASA KSC as an engineer dealing with the payload electrical interfaces on the space shuttle but I was having too much fun elsewhere and I turned it down. Another friend of mine, and someone I later worked with, designed and built the deep IR sensors for the Hubble Space Telescope and he still has the prototypes.
For a short time, I worked with some of the engineers from a company in Canada that built big automated machines used to make the very large wire wrap backplanes for main frame computers and other uses. I don't remember how the name was spelled but it was Dimetco or something like that. At the time we needed very large, extremely fast video processors so we were building the entire system with the then new, experimental GaAs chips and everything was done in hardware and they were building WW boards for us that would hold several thousand ICs per board. The amount of WW on those boards was absolutely insane! Occasionally the machine that was WW'ing the boards would lose track of where it was and it would shift one row or column of the WW connections, and every row/column after it, over one position. That was a real AW-S***! moment when we found that, especially when we had already started populating the board.
I don't know if it's still around here but I used to have one of those boards that was fully build and worked but was always "glitchy" and couldn't be trusted so they finally scrapped it. It had over 2500 socketed ICs on it and I was pulling the ICs and using them for other projects and I eventually found one IC where one of the legs had folded under the IC instead of going into the socket. From the outside it appeared to be perfectly fine but when I removed the IC I found the pin folded under. I'm sure the the pin pressed against the socket and would work occasionally but with temperature cycling it would gradually creep away from the socket and not make contact.
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