Reccomended wire for wirewraping. - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Ferroto
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 29, 2011, 11:17:54 pm
content: I'm thinking of doing a wirewrap. I'm taking on a project that for practical purposes cannot be prototyped on solderless breadboard.I saw a youtube video where someone had the wires on the component side and just used headers as wirewrap terminals. I was wondering what type of wire I should use for doing a wirewrap. I'm about to order a bunch of stuff from mouser and it'd be a shame to make a separate order for wire.

author: beerhunter
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2011, 12:00:31 am
content: This video is not about wirewrap at all. This is about good old point to point wiring and that board will take days to make all the connections. Forget about mistakes, ya gotta dig into the wire bundle to find the wire, desolder, it make a new one and solder it back in.Search for wire wrap sockets where the pins are one inch long to add the wire. Then search on wire wrap guns that are battery operated or plug into wall power. These typically run a couple of hundred dollars for a decent one. You need wire wrap bits in either 30 gauge or 26 gauge wire.You also need Kynar wire that you use for the wiring connections. You also need wire strippers for 30 or 26 gauge wire. These are not the strippers that look like a pair of pliers, much different. Probably acouple of hundred bucks there too. Unwrap tools to fix your mistakes or make mods to the circuit. Radio Shack used to have a hand wrap tool which I have two of but I don't know if they still carry them, probably do.You don't mention if this is work or hobby related but if hobby related manual hand wrapping is fine just damn slow.Electric guns are great and worth the money if you have hundreds or thousands of connections to make. Each wire is two connections.I used to do this professionally at one of my electronics jobs for minor mistakes and circuit changes. The big jobs were actually done by machines run by a computer obviously and these were really neat to watch.The board backplanes for all the PC cards to insert into were wirewrap and these went into the black boxes used on the B-1B bomber for the Air Force.A handful of us technicians were trained and qualified annually on the procedures and thats where I learned about it. Once you get the hang of it you can fly pretty fast with few errors as long as you concentrate and everybody leaves you alone.P2P is fine for up to 50 connections or so. After that wirewrap is the choice for large projects.

author: Trigger
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 30, 2011, 06:16:39 am
content: I watched some of the other videos and he does use wirewrapping. I've used wirewrapping from time to time for prototyping but I've always used the wirewrap sockets. In the videos he uses standard sockets soldered and puts breakaway headers right beside them so he can do the wirewrap on top.As a "sparky" rate in the Navy I was trained in SMT, PTH, and wire wrap repair for some of the gear on the subs. I scoffed at wire wrap at first but guess what gear was the most reliable? The wire wrap...I get my supplies from Jameco.The standard tool you want is the 30AWG Modifiedhttps://www.jameco.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Product_10001_10001_242798_-1The difference between modified and regular tools is modified has the insulation intact on the first couple of wrapsYou can search for Kynar and get the 30AWG wire you need on there.

author: Ferroto
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2011, 01:57:16 pm
content: Quote from: beerhunter on May 30, 2011, 12:00:31 amThis is only hobby related stuff so I'll probably just stick with the hand tools.

author: beerhunter
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: May 31, 2011, 11:38:53 pm
content: Well understood, I do it now as a hobby only too. I have not checked but OK TOOLS used to have wire wrap stuff also. Have to look into that........

author: A-sic Enginerd
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: June 02, 2011, 08:59:09 pm
content: In college, pretty much all our projects were wire wrap.The generic little $5 hand tool worked just fine. Spools of 30 AWG wire and the special little stripper (a lot of times it comes with the wrapping tool) can take you a long ways.For our senior project, we did step up to point-2-point soldering for that. But still made use of the same 30 AWG wire for that. Did have one component that we had to wire wrap because of the one and only socket we could get for it. (was a SCSI controller that only came in SMT package).Handy stuff to have, even for the long haul.