[Elecraft] To Blob or not to Blob... Who asked that question

[Bill Tippett]

AC7AC wrote:
 >If you manage to heat the copper wire instead of just the enamel, it will
strip more quickly. That's why a lot of "blobbers" start with the cut end of
the wire where the copper is exposed and work up towards the core.

         I recently built the Emtech ZM-2 ATU for my K2 and there is a very
nice description of tinning leads including a short video on their website:

L2 DETAIL.
Notice that all of the leads are tinned before installation. This may seem 
to be a basic concept but I have learned from experience that people don't 
tin leads of torroids prior to installation.

When my father worked at Northern Radio he would bring home torroids for me 
to wind. Part of the job was to tin the leads. We did this with a solder 
pot. That was a nice way to do it. I, like most people, do not have a 
solder pot. But it is very easy to tin leads on toroids.

It is easy to do, just scrape a little of the varnish off with a knife or 
exacto. You just need a section of bare wire not a sparkling clean wire. 
Now, start at that cleaned spot and using lots of solder wet out the lead. 
You should supply a constant flow of new solder to the meltpoint during the 
process.

Here is a video of how to tin leads:

56K version
<http://emtech.steadynet.com/rm/tinning_200_l.ram>200K version

http://emtech.steadynet.com/gallery.shtml (about 2/3 down the page)

73,  Bill  W4ZV