How to Use Wire Strippers

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Drew Finch here for Expert Village and we are talking about standard hand tools and how to use them. Now we are going to use a couple of basic tools to help strip some romex wire if you are doing any wiring. The first thing we have to do is get the sheathing off outside of it and to do that we have this stripper. There is a water gage meter on this stripper. If you need to know what size wire you have and inside there is a little razor that is used to cut through that wire. You see it hanging down from here a little bit. So that when we actually put a wire in here, it will cup right down the center of the wire so that it won't cut either of the conductors in it, it might touch the ground wire. So we just put it in here, squeeze it down. Now that little razor has gone down into the wire and as we pull the wire through it, it cuts through. So now we can peel the insulation off the wire back to where we started and then the paper comes right off and we can clip it off. The other handy device that we will need when we are stripping the wires is a pair of vike which are just cutters and we can cut the wire. We will cut the insulation off the wire. So now we've got it down to this point and we have insulation on the wire that we want stripped off. So we have these little strippers. The wire strippers we have different sizes. Now you can see some of them are larger than others. We just line up for the proper size wire. This is a 14 gage wire so we put it right in here, clamp it down. That actually cuts through insulation so we got to cut right down and now we pull them apart. So what we have essentially done is severed insulation without touching the wire and the insulation will pull off as we slide these to the side. So these will come right off and fall off. Now we have a stripped piece of wire. "