Recycling wire strippers full#

The wire itself produces a gap between these two plates. Sandwich the wire with two pieces of the plate material. Lay a piece of the wire to be stripped on a flat surface.

I use a piece of the wire I'm about to slit to create the jig and basically build the jig upside down. With heavy work gloves on I just used my thumb or the end of a ratchet handle pressed on the top of the slot. For wire stripping you want just enough down force to keep the wire held down against the blade to cut the insulation but not the copper.

Recycling wire strippers full#

For slitting the trim I had full cutting force because I was cutting clean through the trim. If the slot is too deep then you will have trouble keeping something in the slot to create down force. The slot depth is helpful because it lets you control the down force on the blade as you pull the wire through. This way your down force device will make contact with the wire as you pull it through the slot. For wire, the slot should be slightly less than the wire diameter. For trim slitting the slot shoud be deep to help hold the down force device in place and to protect your hands from the blade. For wire the height is very low, the thickness of the insulation you are slitting. For trim, the height can be big because you are cutting clean through the trim. Adding the blade between them later on will provide enough play for the wire to pull through easily. A+B equals the diameter of the wire you are trying to slit. In this picture I illustrate four variables. The main differences are the cutting depth and angle of the blade and the depth of the slot. Once you've seen the Flickr photos you can see how the setup needs to be changed a little to strip wire. I will only have a few in this instructable. You can see all of the pictures on my Flickr site. It works the same way, just doesn't cut clear through the material being cut, in this case insulated wire. This is a modification of a device I made to slit plastic trim down in width. It also keeps the wire straight as it's being slit. Using the device this way prevents you from getting cut on the blade, if you set it as I describe below. It is possible for the end of one of your wires to fling up and smack you in the face. You'll want to wear gloves for sure and possibly eye protection.

You will also need some way of holding the device that can withstand a significant amount of force. One of those blades that is already scored so when the tip gets dull you just snap it off and you have a new, sharp tip. I used the blade out of my utility knife. You can buy similar pieces of metal at any hardware or hobby store in many thicknesses. I had some aluminum plates that were used as shims in a large format scanner. To do it well you'll need several thicknesses of metal. The materials you'll need can be just about anything. I needed something to hold the knife and the wire in a consistent position while I ran the blade along the length of the wire. I came up with this when I had some wire to strip and found that using a utility knife to hand slit the insulation just wasn't going to work.