There's a type of enamled wire that's intended to be soldered through. It used to be used for the Vector Wiring Pencil, and is still available intended as transformer wire. I bought the smallest spool I could (1 pound - at 30 gauge that's nearly a mile!), and still use the Vector Pencil for some projects. My wife and I sometimes put together creative projects that include lots of LEDs mounted without circuit boards, and this type of wiring works really well by just wrapping a couple of turns right around the LED leads, and soldering it in place. A couple of the brand names of this wire (Google "solder strippable magnet wire") are Solidon and Soderex.
In theory, the insulation is even intended to act as flux, so you can just use a solder pot to do the soldering. In practice, I found that it is a little more tedious than soldering regular (stripped) wire. In fact, I abandoned it back in the 70's/80's for wiring up tons of IC's, because there were occasional cold or even non-conductive joints, which were a pain to track down. Mostly, this is because I didn't heat the joints long enough to cook off all the insulation, but it was still a pain. Nowadays, I only use it for specific applications, and I make sure that I cook the joints longer than my natural inclination, but my success rate is pretty nearly 100% On something like tube leads, where overheating the component isn't too big a concern, it should work fine. According to WikiPedia, most magnet wire now has this type of insulation, bu not older wire. This may be, but the brands I mentioned above are specifically intended to be soldered this way. There also used to be a solvent specifically intended to strip insulation, but I've never used it. It may not be available any longer, because it probably wasn't the healthiest stuff around. ~~ Mark On Sunday, December 8, 2013 3:02:22 PM UTC-8, AlexTsekenis wrote: > > For any diameter of enamel-coated wire larger than a strand of hair, the > burnt enamel should be removed to expose the copper. Otherwise solder > wetting will be poor and the soldering process frustrating. > You can do this using fine sandpaper, a file, or a sharp knife. Burning > the enamel first makes removal easier. For thin wires the soldering iron is > adequate. Larger diameters require a lighter. Even large diameters a small > blowtorch. Tin the wire prior to soldering using a generous amount of flux. > This will also show you if you did a good job scrapping off the burnt > enamel. > > Alex > > On Sunday, December 8, 2013 10:55:05 PM UTC, Gideon Wackers wrote: >> >> Well the first board is filled with tubes, and my head is filled with >> headache from peering at the board.. The enameled wire was very hard to >> solder even after burning off the enamel layer. Although I do not dare to >> show the abomination that I call "soldering" the tubes are all connected. >> Don't worry I know how to solder, but the enamel wire was giving me a very >> hard time. The nice thing about the enamel wire was that it was easy to go >> through the forest of component legs. I'm off to bed. >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/e0f4e625-b3c7-457d-ae01-1917a5171f14%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
