Be careful because wire does burn. Remember the old Boy Scout trick for starting a fire using an old SOS pad and a battery?
I can assure you, nothing like that happened. It is a split second touch of the flame to the end of the wire and then you pull off the insulation on the end of the wire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5o2drU65UM
Rich
You MIGHT potentially set the insulation on fire if you’re really stupid about it, but even that is unlikely as it will MELT from the temperature of something designed to ignite paper or wood, but it needs a much higher temperature to burn. ANd copper, you’re not even going to soften that with a lighter. The steel wool trick works because you are passing enough current through a fine enough piece of wire that you are eceeding the current carrying capacity of the wire. That would be like taking a piece of that #30 wire and sticking it in a light socket (DO NOT DO THAT!!!), it will pretty much vaporize. Or say you had a piece of said wire running between the front and rear pickups of a loco, and the loco derailed so that that wire was no across the rails, and you had a 5 amp DCC system with no circuit protection at all - 15V 5A passing through that wire would make the copper heat up to glowing, melting the insulation and anything around it and easily getting hot enough to ignight some paper or fine wood shavings before finally melting and breaking the circuit. Same as the steel wool trick.
Who had slot cars? I know I’m not the only one who would put pieces of steel wool across the track and squeeze the controller and watch the steel wool burn…
–Randy
How about forgetting that you had a clip lead hot-to-ground downstream of a 70 amp breaker you turned on?
Turns out it only vaporizes a little section of the wire. Right where there’s a new hole through the insulation. Hey, a wire nut and it’s as good as new, right?
Oh, yeah. The breaker didn’t trip. Guess the fault was cleared pretty darn quickly.
Ed
Well there was the time my friend was demonstrating using his digital multimeter at school in physics class, forgetting he had two small pieces of phone wire wrapped around the probes to plug in to a breadboard. He sticks the probes in a nearby outlet, after making sure the meter was set to a proper range, and the two little bits of wire contacted each other - POOF!.
–Randy
We used to launch solid fuel model rockets using a short piece of nichrome wire between two small aligator clips as the igniter.
Robert
Thumbnail seems fine.
In the 1960’s when I wired US Navy submarine periscopes, we stripped Teflon coated wire with a thermal device that plugged into a resistance solder iron controller. We had to use a vent hood also.
I just Googled the issue. Many types of wire strippers out there for Teflon wire…
Rich
Hello all,
If you are going to solder the wire, one method I learned as a bench technician was to “tin” the wire without stripping the insulation.
The heat from the soldering iron will melt the insulation back while tinning the wire simultaneously.
Practice this a few times to see how the insulation reacts to the heat.
The now tinned and “stripped” wire can be trimmed to length as close to the insulation as needed.
Hope this helps.
Thanks. jj, that does help.
Rich
I wound up using the open flame approach, and it worked just fine.
We keep a butane lighter around for lighting the fireplace, and that became my tool of choice.
Thanks to everyone for your comments and suggestions.
Rich
hi! where did you get that wire? thanks Paul