How to Prep the Wire for Soldering & Circuit Bending

Video Transcript

"AMANDA CLAIRE: All right, so now what I've done is I've cut two more pieces of wire to length, we're going to now solder same things, strip the ends, tin the copper tips, hook one into one terminal, one into the other, solder them to the terminals and then from there--well one of them is going to go to one of those two points from the circuit board and the other is going to go to the other of those two points, and then we'll solder them in there. And then when we're done with that, we're close it up and see if that switch does what we want it to. So, I'm just going to kind of get started with that, go ahead and strip the tips of my wires again here. Again, just all you need is just a little tiny bit of exposed metal there. There I just have about eighth of an inch so it will be plenty, maybe a little bit more for the side that we're going to hook into that terminal of the switch itself. Okay, so there's one of our wires, let's get kind of this other one down here, and there's one. We'll use that side because it's a little longer for the switch, and then that little one there, good. All right, so first step, remember, we're going to tin little wire, so I'm going to clean our tip here, we're going to get the wire hot, we're just kind of put in near the solder here, you see my solder coil coming up here, going to get the wire hot and just kind of let the solder--Whoops!--Just kind of let the solder flow, kind of right on to it and there it is, that's all it takes. I mean it happens so fast. So, now the tip of this wire is tinned, and since we're here, might as well to just get to the other side. Look, there it is; it happens almost instantly. So, going to make, just like we did before, we're going to make kind of a little hook shape here and put the little circuit board up, we're going to put it in one of these two. You know, well, one thing to think about when you're doing this kind of thing is sometimes, if you make the piece of exposed wire too long, it might be even long enough to kind of bridge one of the contacts of the switch and touch the other one, in which case that switch isn't going to do its thing, so you really to make sure that every contact you make, every solder joint you make, really only is bonding the wire that you're interested in at the contact on the component you're interested in, and really try and make sure that there's no metal-to-metal contact or solder-to-wire or solder-to-contact connection that you didn't intend. So, okay good, so now we got this one in place."