Sometimes they fail at the plug, sometimes at the phones. Is there any trick for soldering those wires which seem to have lacquered multi-strand conductors wrapped around a bit of "floss"? Hoping to make one good out of two dead ones.
Big blob of solder. Litz wire or tinsel wire.
NT
newshound brought next idea :
To solder joint, you would have to pick all of the 'floss' out - and it is almost impossible. You would most likely miss some, which would ruin the joint.
Find some really fine single strand bare copper wire to bind round and round each stripped end, with a thicker length of copper wire laid in the same binding, a bit of sleeving over the top, then you may be able to solder onto the original terminal, or even joint to another similar wire if both are over-bound onto the same thicker wire.
with teenagers & ipods I've given up - we just buy a dozen ebay cheapies periodically and treat them as perishable commodities.
another option is to replace the lead altogether.
NT
Or scrape with a sharp blade to scratch off some lacquer, and crimp in a tiny bootlace ferrule. You may then be able to solder to the ferrule, although it's not guaranteed because the floss might melt and interfere with the electrical connection in the crimp. May need to double over or more inside the ferrule to get enough material in there to crimp.
BT tinsel wire crimps used to have sharp internal serrations which acted rather more like an insulation displacement connection than a crimp, and ring terminals so they weren't soldered.
These seem to be about 10 x 0.03 mm: a bit small for scraping! The trick is to expose the individual conductors, fire up one of those "cigarette lighter" gas torches with the minimum flame, touch tip of conductor to outer cone which lights the "floss", blow it out after it's burned a few mm, scrape off "carbon" with thumbnail, then heat a bit more which burns off the enamel. That leaves a section which will tin adequately with ordinary resin core flux (may need a couple of attempts). I don't think I'd attempt to solder to plug, too likely to have stray bridges. But two cables can be soldered and heatshrinked in the usual way. For info, I joined a figure of eight, gold plus green in one, red plus red/green in the other, to a single three core (gold, red, green). Gold and red/green are common, red and green are the signal. On standard plugs, the body is common with sleeve and tip as signal. Not an "economic" repair at least on £10 units, but a satisfying one.
Thanks all for the suggestions.
Cut out the 'floss' and solder, you can tin a few strands and then use these to twist all into a bunch .. then solder.
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