Teeth on that size works quick and easy.

Everything from 18 to 4GA i do with this..
 

I fly with these, push cover away with thumb. For working on cars, perfect.: http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1481659057.JPG

I'm connecting mini-XLR headers to a PCB. It's a 40khz signal, so it's pretty particular about what kind of wire it likes. I'm using a solid 22 gauge stuff that it likes a lot. I could use premade breadboard wires, if they came in the right specs -- but most of the wires I find are stranded, which seems to screw with the ultrasonic signal. :(

Loving the suggestions! :)

All of you who suggest simple manual methods are right -- I can strip wire with an exacto or my teeth or my thumbnails, it's just time consuming and error prone. The other night, I threw together 3 boards, each of which had 4 mini-XLR jacks, each of which had 4 connectors. So I prepped 48 little bits of wire, which meant repeating the "strip" operation 96 times. Or something like that.

Aschen -- I love the thermal stripper, that makes way more sense than what I'm doing. I suspect even a low cost unit would work great for the scale I'm working with, and couldn't be that expensive. I'll start keeping my eyes open for one.

BleuCamaro -- If you say the StripMaster is a tool that's worked for you, I'll try it. I love the idea of being able to strip cleanly with a single motion without mutilating the wire. My only hesitation is that the StripMaster looks pretty much the same as the two separate ones that I got from Amazon. #hesitant

I give...

Been a tech for around 20 years and never seen anything like that, what is it/how does it work?

That thermal stripper is was cool! Next time we are ordering tools for the shop I will look those up.

Low tech but this process works well for me:

https://youtu.be/n5o2drU65UM

surprisingly they seem pretty cheap on ebay. I might get one for home use. If this is a regular thing for you, i think it would be a worthwile investment. We use them at work for reliabilty issues, we do not want any tool marks on a conductor to enable fatiuge failures.



Teledyne Kinetics TW-1 Stripall Thermal Wire Stripper | eBay

I stared at it for a few min as well. I think the pitchfork thingie strips and it is set to a depth to have the same amount of exposed wire everytime?

I've spent that much on manual wire strippers already. I think next time I have a batch to do -- which will amount to something like 200 wire strip operations -- I'll do the research and get one of those. For $75, it looks like it'll be much faster and easier than the strangled operation I'm doing now, with no risk of damaging the underlying wire.

You could always use your teeth to strip those small wires, just make sure the wire doesn't slip up into your gums and cut into them so far the wire is embedded into the bone!


If that don't make ya shudder, i don't know what will.