John, W1RT wrote: I'm no metallurgist, but I'd do some testing to make sure that temp doesn't make the copper weird and brittle. Seems to me that I've had magnet wire go brittle in the flame of a butane lighter. Wiggle around a stripped piece and make sure it doesn't snap off easily ..
-------------------- Excellent point. I have seen copper crystallize, apparently from heat. Something that I've noticed that keeps me from cooking the wires with too hot a flame is that the copper will oxidize so badly it's very hard to get it to take solder. I've had to scrape the oxidation off of copper that had been really hot in order to tin it using rosin flux! That's sort of going around in circles if the objective was to tin enameled wire! The Number 1 Trick I've found that lets me heat-strip my toroid wires quickly and easily is to first scrape to the wire. I just scrape it along the length once. Normally I use a small blade screwdriver. I trap the wire between the screwdriver blade and the bench top and, starting from the core or wherever I want to start stripping, drag the blade to the end to take of one strip of enamel. Then I go ahead with the solder blob method. I find that the bit of bare wire lets the wire heat a lot faster so it burns off the enamel from the inside as much as the solder blob does from the outside...and there's that much less enamel to burn <G>. Ron AC7AC _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: [email protected] You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
