Hacking Strippers To Do Your Bidding

wire_strippers

[Alex] knows his strippers.

By his estimation, he has stripped millions of wires over the years, and he has seen his fair share of wire strippers come and go. That cheap set of wire strippers you have with the graduated holes, or that adjustable stripper you squeeze as you pull the wire through? They just stress the insulation as well as the wires you are trying to strip – he says you might as well just use them in your tackle box.

His favorite style of wire stripper is the automatic kind that grip the wire, then cut and remove the insulation just by squeezing the handles. His issue with this particular tool is that it’s difficult to get a uniform length of stripped wire when working in volume.

Since [Alex] needs uniformity in his line of work, he modified a set of automatic wire strippers to include an adjustable wire stop. He determines the length of wire he needs, adds or removes some washers from his wire stop, and off he goes. It’s a very simple yet very useful hack, depending on your application. We bet it is probably one of the most accurate ways to get uniform length, this side of a fully automatic wire stripper.

38 thoughts on “Hacking Strippers To Do Your Bidding

  1. I have the same pair as bob and they have served me extremely well, however they are not good for short lengths of wire as they pull the wire through the insulation sometimes…

  2. try looking at facom wire strippers they cut the cable aswell as stripping both ends of where you cut adjustable to twithin 0.5mm would never be without my pair whilst panel building

  3. First: A good Wire-Stripper is quite expensive.
    Second: Most automatic strippers dammage the insulation a bit, where they grip the wire. There are industries, where only non-damaging wire strippers are allowed. These look much like the one in the pictures.

  4. Speaking of strippers, did anybody else know that many stripper poles have bearings in them to enable angular rotation? I wonder what would happen if you installed thrust bearing instead?

  5. “That cheap set of wire strippers you have with the graduated holes, or that adjustable stripper you squeeze as you pull the wire through? They just stress the insulation as well as the wires you are trying to strip – he says you might as well just use them in your tackle box.”

    Gotta nit-pick a little bit about this. Automatic wire strippers are nice and all but I wouldn’t throw the cheapies in the tackle box. I can’t be the only one who occasionally solders one end of a short jumper to a piece of proto-board then realizes that I forgot to strip the other end. Bulky auto-strippers won’t save you there.

  6. “First: A good Wire-Stripper is quite expensive.
    Second: Most automatic strippers dammage the insulation a bit, where they grip the wire. There are industries, where only non-damaging wire strippers are allowed.”

    And these hold true to the regular strippers as well.

    Stay away from the automatic ones, they cause a LOT of damage.

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