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Some nice Christmas light viewing weather coming up. Temperatures have been swinging like crazy lately resulting in a few stupid windy days.
I've been tinkering with my heated glove designs again and managed to come up with a better method to attach electrical wires to the carbon heat rope. Last year I wrapped the wires around the rope and superglued it in place, which had 2 problems. It proved to be physically weak and came apart, and in wrapping the wires I inadvertently made a heating coil creating localized hotspots.
New method is to strip some wire, use 20 cm length of 4 of the individual conductor strands like twine to tightly wrap around the wire to the carbon, squish it flat with some pliers, wipe on a little paste flux, tin with solder to cement everything together, then trim the excess. Later I'll cover the connection with plastidip. Very strong, no local heating, and a fraction of the size of the old splices. My plan was to order a spool of thin bare copper wire for the wrapping, but Amazon sent me the wrong stuff twice and I don't see other in country options for 30+ AWG wire that isn't enameled.