cardas 21 AWG LITZ COAX

From The Cardas Website Regarding The Soldering Of Litz Wires

  1. Use a solder pot (best, easiest and most reliable) Dip the wire in flux and hold in the solder until fully tinned. Repeat if neccessary.
  2. Sand off (220-320-grit wet or dry unravel strand and lay flat on table, a couple of strokes on each side) the insulation and use a little rosin flux on the wire. With a good 900 degree Fahrenheit (482 degrees Celsius) tip on a 100 watt iron you can pre-tin the wire.
  3. Twist a little piece of unenamled wire around the litz such as a resistor lead and solder normally using using some rosin flux (such as Kester sp88). Heat the bare copper wire you have wound around the litz and add solder and rosin flux until you see the litz suck up the solder.
  4. If the wire is to be soldered to a pc board, placed through an eyelet, crimped in a spade or other connector or otherwise surrounded by solder. In a closed loop you can solder it by just putting a little rosin flux on the wire as you twist the strands after stripping. On the surrounding piece of metal heat the metal or the very tip of the Cardas litz and watch for the smoke of the coating coming off and the tinning of the wire near the surrounding metal.
  5. You can pre tin the wire by applying some rosin flux during the striping operation and heating the very tip of the wire in a pool of solder on the tip (850-900 degrees F) of a 100w Iron.
  6. You can get a large iron with a hot tip and dimple the tip so that it will hold a little solder and use it for a solder pot. I have heard 100 other ways over the years, but basically, if you can hold some hot solder around the wire or at the tip of the conductor and use some rosin flux it will tin in a second if the tip of the Iron is hot enough. The chief downfall of this method is not using a hot enough or large enough iron. We use 100 watt Wellers with 900 degree F pencil tips. Anything this hot/big or bigger will work.
  7. The thinner the wire the easier it goes. The tonearm wires tin very easily just by feeding them into thin spooled solder. The heavier wires like the Coax Shield require the very hot tips or solder pot for complete tinning. More effort, but very worth the effort to do it right.

For methods other than the solder pot method, it is best to use a locking forcep as a heatsink to prevent the heat from traveling down the insulation.

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