More than any sane person wants to know about the wire stripper.
I was fixing some bad wiring in a vehicle today. I came across some wires that were smaller than the wire strippers would do. Rather and going back into the shop to get the correct tool I thought I would use the one on my Pioneer X.
These are small wires maybe 18 gauge. I really should’ve measured them. They have a stranded core and not one solid conductor. Automotive wire is always multi strand so it flexes and doesn’t break from fatigue. I’ve tried the wire stripper before but not for real.
This was very soft flexible wire. For the first attempt I just bent the wire over the notch and tried to strip the jacket off in one shot. It worked taking the jacket off most of the conductor but I give this method a fail. It broke off strands of the conductor. Maybe 1/4 of them. Even one broken strand is a fail in reality because you just made the wire smaller than it’s supposed to be and could potentially cause a fire because it’s underrated.
For the next method I put the wire in the notch of the cap lifter. The cap lifter was at 90 degrees. I lightly placed the main blade on the wire. The pressure of the 93mm main spring folded the wire. I’m my head I thought I would be able to guide the knife around the wire scoring the jacket. That didn’t work. The wire just twisted. What I ended up doing was pinching the wire between my fingers on each side and rolled them both the same direction then back. This achieved a good result. Then I lifted the blade off and held the wire at the notch as before and pulled the jacket off. Yes it worked. I didn’t look closely but I think all the copper conductor was intact.
My conclusion is this isn’t great. Well it isn’t great for multi strand wire. I imagine a single heavy conductor wire would work much better. All of the issues I had probably wouldn’t happen with a stiff single strand wire. The notch is so small you really couldn’t use it on wire much bigger than I had. Unless the notch is simply to offer resistance to help locate the wire acting as a backstop. But then the notch wouldn’t help much when you used it to pull the jacket off. I don’t know maybe it would? I’ll have to test it out more. Maybe I’m doing it wrong too?
It’s funny this wire stripper is on a very large number of knives but it always gets a mention when people are reviewing a knife. They just skip past it after saying it’s there. I don’t know how many people know or have even tried this function before. I think of all the flack the parcel hook gets and how many people go out of their way demonstrating how they use it but the old wire stripper gets a total pass. I’m not a fan of the parcel hook but I’m not sure how I feel about the wire stripper now.
What I’ve always done when I don’t have a wire stripper is press the the wire down on the blade edge with my thumb and roll it along slicing through the jacket. I then push my thumbnail into the slice and pull the jacket off. It’s really quick and quite easy.
Maybe the common wire gauges are quite different in Switzerland and the EU than here in general. Here we have a stupid power system that uses a lower voltage but higher amps. That requires a larger gauge of wire. It’s far inferior to the rest of the world. It’s interesting to read how that came about if anyone is interested. Corruption in the US basically. We are stuck on the US system here unfortunately. It uses so many more resources to manufacture our wire too. So our household wire is 12 or 14 gauge usually. That’s a measurement called AWG or American Wire Gauge. Now that I think about it that’s not going to be a reference that will mean anything to someone living outside North America I’ll bet. The household solid core wire here is often referred to as Nomex wire. I don’t think the notch on the cap lifter is even big enough for the copper core of Nomex wire to fit in it. I have to try this wire out to know for sure. All of the light switches and wall receptacles I’ve been using for years have a Nomex wire stripper built into each one so you just drag the wire over a notch and the jacket comes off. This is likely a case of the rest of the world got it right and we here are the oddballs with our wire that won’t fit in our knife wire stripper.
Here’s a couple of pictures of this process.
