[sdiy] wire glorious wire

[anthony]

As many of you may know, I geek out over capacitors, like when I find a 
piece of gear chock full of "F" tolerance polystyrene caps or old Sprague 
film & foil with the Orange tubing around it or TRW plastic encapsuled film 
& foil, or Black Cats, or John E. Caps...

But what you may not know is that I geek out over wire too. Like when I find 
a good stash of good quality cloth covered wire or brightly colored thick 
insulated, 22 ga. solid conductor. But I also like newer stuf like what I 
think is called "semi-bond": stranded wire that is already tinned with 
solder all the way up. I like it solitary or in rainbow ribbons, or all 
black in widely-spaced ribbons, maybe with a little line pressed in between 
the conductors to make it easier to separate strands.

I wish I had one of those wire strippers that can do more than one conductor 
at a time.

But just the other day I found in my basement, a considerable stash of 
teflon insulated silver wire. Maybe a mix of 22, 24 & 26 ga.; pretty 
colors... I'm pretty sure it's Teflon because it's a bitch to strip. And I'm 
pretty sure the wire is solid silver because my early botched attempts at 
stripping the wire using my regular wire stripper reavealed no hints of 
copper (and silver plated copper wire is pretty useless really). I've since 
refined my stripping technique to cutting the wire at an angle and using two 
pairs of needle-nose pliers to strip it up the length, much the way I do the 
teflon insulated COAXIAL cable (indeed and coaxial cable nowadays...), 2 
short lenghts of which I found a while ago. I'm pretty sure they were to 
connect a probe to an insanely precise HP quartz thermometer from the 60's 
or early 70's, which also yielded up 6 Nixies and a jillion 2N274's and very 
many of the capacitors I rhapsodize about.

But what to put the silver wire in... Maybe my tube phono preamp project...


cheers,
aa