How to Measure, Cut & Strip Wire for Circuit Bending

Video Transcript

"AMANDA CLAIRE: All right, so it's time to connect the wires to our switch. We got our switch installed, here it is. It's a single-pole-double-throw switch. The point that we want to solder this center pole to is the common point we found for that particular bend, remember we're doing kind of a two-way switch here. It's an either/or for these two little looping behaviors we we're just sort of lucky enough to stumble upon. So the point that we want to solder it to is actually right here, the place I found for the switch in this case just happens to be right under where the circuit board will be reinstalled once we put it back together. So let's think about how much wire we need, you really don't want to use as little wire as necessary 'cause you just--you don't want too many wires that's just kind of clogging up. So it looks like from here to here, we might be able to get by with just 3 or 4 inches maybe. I mean, we don't want it so tight that we can't open up the circuit board and still get in there. So I don't know, maybe this much wire? I'm going to say--let's say 4 inches. So we have our stranded wire here. I'm just kind of estimate out 4 inches, let's say something like that. And I've got my wire cutters here, right here so we're going to cut kind of an estimated length there, keep it reasonably short. Have our wire strippers, I'm not going to strip that much off this wire, I'm actually going to strip only about maybe a 1/8 inch to a 1/4 inch. You don't want to have a too much exposed metal on these wires because any metal that's exposed in a circuit obviously risks being touched by other metal that maybe exposed if it's not all soldered down and kind of every thing's in control. And so that can cause a short circuit and--of course what circuit bending is at the end of the day, it is creative short circuiting but still, if you want to have kind of control over your results, it's good to not strip too much off the ends of those wires. So as you can see, I've only just got maybe just somewhere between 1/8 inch and 1/4 inch kind of stripped out. So there we go, we got the wire ready to go. The next thing we're going to do is tin the tips of the wire with solder and then get into place."