Learn About Wire Cutters & Equipment for Circuit Bending

Video Transcript

AMANDA CLAIRE: All right. So another thing you need are tools to cut and strip your wire. Cutting wire is what it sounds like, it's cutting it to the length that you need. Stripping wire is to--basically is taking that outer insulated sheath off. So, here's a piece of wire where the end of it has been stripped, right? So, you see here's the insulating plastic sheath. There's a bit of the metal wire coming out of it because I've stripped the end of it there. So, there's very simple tools you can use to do that and I'll show you what they are. As far as cutting wire goes, you can cut narrow gauge wire with regular sort of kitchen scissors or craft scissors it's just not a big deal. But you can't really use scissors to do the stripping. A lot of tools like a needle-nose pliers like this one and different kinds of pliers often will have a little wire cutter, kind of right there, kind of in the narrow part of the pliers, and you can use that for cutting wire if you want. Again, maybe not the best tool for stripping wire. Here's some wire strippers here. This is a real simple one here, which if you can see, the tip here kinda has these two little triangles, and if I bring them together, you may or may not be able to see this, but they don't come together all the way. They leave a little hole there, and that's kind of the important thing about a wire stripper is it leaves a hole when you close it so that the wire itself, the metal wire doesn't get cut, but it has a little blade on it so that you do cut the insulation, so then if you kind of close it and then you pull it, you're taking that plastic insulation sheathing off of it but you leave the wire intact. And so, one like this is adjustable, if you just move this little kind of, there's this kind of like a little, there's a screw on the other side you can see and there's a bolt, and if you just move that, you can change the size of the that hole. So, I'll just show you how something like this works. So here's a piece of wire, you just kind of get it on there that holds already about the right size. I've closed it, but it's--so it's cutting that insulation, but it's not cutting the wire. And if I just pull it out, there, I've stripped the wire and that's great, because now I need to have that exposed wire there so I can--that's a little bit much, I mean, I kinda stripped it too much. But the point is, is now it's exposed and then I can make a soldered joint there. Another kind of wire stripper is something like this. This is actually a kind of a multi function tool here you can cut wire, kind of with a tip. You can crimp the insulation or sort of different functions for a tool like this. They're all written all here. But down below, you can see, there's all these different holes here of different sizes. And these are for stripping different gauges of insulated wire. And so, you want to use the hole that's the right size. So you can see a large hole like the one on top isn't going to work well for stripping, you know, wire of kind of small gauge like this one, but I can use some of these holes further down to strip this narrow gauge wire. So, there's a lot of different kinds of wire strippers out there. Remember that cutting of the wire is not that big of a deal, even scissors will do it, but sometimes it's nice to have one tool that will do it all. So something like this is really handy for that.

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