In sci.electronics.repair micky <
NONONO...@fmguy.com> wrote:
>
> It pays to save electronics scrap. I needed a short piece of thin but
> not too thin single strand wire and I don't seem to have any except for
> a collection of 8 wires soldered into an octal plug from a 1930's (or
> 40's or 50's?) radio. (the kind of plug that uses a tube socket)
>
> IIRC, I got this 40 years ago and I think I got it from someone else's
> scrap, so it's easily 60 years old. The red, blue, and brown wires are
> quite pretty but the yellow? wires seem very dirty. I wonder why.
>
> It's actually not single strand but the entire length of the
> multi-strand is tinned.
>
> Does that mean they used solder on 100's of thousands of miles of wire
> when only a teeny tiny bit ever appeared out of the insulation? Isn't
> that a big waste of tin and lead? Do they still do that?
I've seen this wire- it looked like the standard cloth covered wire in a
old TV or radio set, but was completely solderered, not just tinned. Not
sure what the reason for this was either.
> Another interesting factoid: I needed to use for the first time some
> liquid rosin flux (in a little bottle from MG Chemicals). I've had it
> for 10 years unopened and it has one of those obnoxious caps that you
> have to press down before turning. No matter how hard I pressed down,
> it eventually ratcheted over what it was supposed to catch on. I tried
> over and over, last night. This morning it opened on the second try!
> The room temperature is about the same.
How does flux go "bad"? I use the liquid type in what looks like a paint
marker and it still works fine, way past the "use by" date.