[Elecraft] Butane torch for stripping/tinning magent wire

[Ron D'Eau Claire]

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