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Registered Member #72
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 08:29AM
Location: UK St. Albans
Posts: 1659
To strip even very fine wire without chemicals or heat, you need fine abrasive paper, and patience.
Remove the outer cotton so that the strands can fan out and lay flat. Then wearing gloves to keep your finger grease off the bits you're about to solder, take a bit of at least 500 grit paper on your finger, and use gentle counter-pressure from your thumb, and just pass the fanned ends through a few times, squeezing very gently. If you can hear the scrape of abrasive on wire, then you're doing it too hard. Turn the fan over and repeat. You can use coarser paper if you are even more gentle.
You don't need to have removed all the varnish all the way round.
Registered Member #4074
Joined: Mon Aug 29 2011, 06:58AM
Location: Australia
Posts: 335
2Spoons wrote ...
The lye I used is sold as drain cleaner. We can't get the sulphuric acid drain cleaner OTC in New Zealand, only the lye type.
Would low-purity hydrochloric acid work at all? I'm not experienced with what solvents work with certain materials, but you can purchase 20%-30% purity hydrochloric acid OTC as a pool additive for adjusting the pools pH levels. We have a salt water pool installed, which needs regular pH adjustments and we have a few of bags of salt, chlorine and some 10 litre bottles of acid in a closet.
Registered Member #2939
Joined: Fri Jun 25 2010, 04:25AM
Location:
Posts: 615
You could try acid, but in this case its not a solvent type process. What happens is the polymer is actually broken up by the strong alkali. Other polymers undergo these sorts of reactions too - PET (soda bottles) is one that comes to mind.
Registered Member #72
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 08:29AM
Location: UK St. Albans
Posts: 1659
Have you tried burning it off? Pass the end of the wire through the flame from a match. It will burn the insulation quickly, and oxidise the copper slowly. Clean up the wire afterwards very gently with very fine sandpaper, or a pan scourer. The thinner the wire, the quicker you will have to be to retain enough of it, which means there is a lower limit of wire below it will not work well. But it's worth a try, as it's very cheap and low tech.
Registered Member #2939
Joined: Fri Jun 25 2010, 04:25AM
Location:
Posts: 615
Dr. Slack wrote ...
The thinner the wire, the quicker you will have to be to retain enough of it, which means there is a lower limit of wire below it will not work well.
This is the core of the problem, and is exactly why I prefer chemical stripping : its is much simpler and more reliable than any method requiring physical abrasion. The wire I was stripping is hair thin (0.08mm), soft and fragile.
The point of this thread was to let people know about an alternative method than can be used in difficult situations. It took me a bit of hunting and experimenting to work this out, so I thought I'd save others the trouble.
Registered Member #5258
Joined: Sun Jun 10 2012, 10:15PM
Location: Missouri - USA
Posts: 119
I see this had already been discussed but for the high temp litz wire i've always used Lye (sodium hydroxide) in a custom solder pot heated to about 600F under a fume hood. It bubbles a lot so make sure you don't fill the pot to the brim. Once the bubbling stops I rinse it in water then dip in flux and dip it in a solder pot containing 400F pure tin.
For the low temp enameled litz I just use pure tin in an 400F solder pot. I dip the litz in flux before it goes in the pot for added measure. Just did some a while back. Low temp shown here. I'll see if I can find pics of the hot NaOH dips.
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How to strip and tin litz wire
