Q-Tips

[Poppa (K)]

not sure if this has been thought of before or not.....

untwisting Fused Claptons is a PIA. scarring the wire because you don't have nylon pliers is really painful. trying to use tape on the jaws of your pliers is a PIA, and could leave reside.

solution: cut a plastic hollow stem Q-Tip (the cheap ones), into 2 pieces as long as the jaws are wide. place them over the wire and flatten the pieces of tubing on a flat section of the the finished wire with your pliers. you now have a sliding set of plastic jaws for your pliers that won't scar the wire.

 

[sychosis]

You could also use a set of vise grip welding clamps , they have a 1 in pad on each jaw . Clamped down tight it should not Mar the wire just flatten it . These can be picked up for about 20 bucks at home Depot or less from harbor freight . Just a thought though

 

[robot zombie]

I always just grab the end of it with pliers while it's still in the chuck and twist it the opposite direction at low speed. It's uneven, but if you don't go too fast twisting them to begin with, or more just keep a consistent speed for most of the length while twisting it up, it's easy enough to turn it back to a point where you can work the rest out as you wrap the coils *shrugs* I'm lazy. I prefer hard and simple over easy and elaborate.

 

[Poppa (K)]

I always just grab the end of it with pliers while it's still in the chuck and twist it the opposite direction at low speed. It's uneven, but if you don't go too fast twisting them to begin with, or more just keep a consistent speed for most of the length while twisting it up, it's easy enough to turn it back to a point where you can work the rest out as you wrap the coils *shrugs* I'm lazy. I prefer hard and simple over easy and elaborate.

i'll give that a go as well. i have soooo much to learn.

 

[robot zombie]

i'll give that a go as well. i have soooo much to learn.

Tried it yet? TBH, I've never used pliers or anything to work the twists out, so I'm curious as to how the technique I'm accustomed to compares. I've been doing this stuff for a while, so I can be stuck in my ways. My techniques are my own in that I haven't used tutorials since I learned how to build standard coils - I'm self-taught. But that is to say that some of the stuff I've come up with is probably a little hokey compared to what the more well-learned builders do.

I figure there's got to be a reason why most people don't use the approach that I do. Like everything else that I do, it's just something I came up with just by working with what I had in front of me, which at the time was a drill and one pair of needle-nose pliers. It worked well enough that I kept doing it, but it's probably not the best way. It just worked the first time, so I kept doing it that way. Never really thought about it after that.

There's always more to learn, man. That q-tip trick is pretty clever. I tried it with two pairs of little cheapo harbor freight angle-nose toothless pliers and it worked pretty well. I could see myself using it for the odd stubborn fused wire with lots of rogue twists in it.

 

[Poppa (K)]

i haven't had anything that was twisty over the past couple of builds. but i will definitely give it a go the next time i get one that is all twisted.

i'm using the stems to try and keep the bruising down to a minimum (i'm a perfectionist when it comes to stuff like this). it is something that i will use until i go the nylon jaw pliers route.

 

[Poppa (K)]

Q-Tip #100:

use a piece of stem to lock the wire into a loop at your swivel point. quick and clean. no tape. no twisting loops.

 

[Poppa (K)]

I always just grab the end of it with pliers while it's still in the chuck and twist it the opposite direction at low speed. It's uneven, but if you don't go too fast twisting them to begin with, or more just keep a consistent speed for most of the length while twisting it up, it's easy enough to turn it back to a point where you can work the rest out as you wrap the coils *shrugs* I'm lazy. I prefer hard and simple over easy and elaborate.

spot on. i tried it today, and it worked like a charm