Wiring splice advice

Sabers
1

I’m doing a thin neck build that I will have no choice but to splice a few wires together to complete. Two 22awg and one 28awg, in a very cramped space. Approx 1 inch or even less.

My only experience with splicing has been on much larger wires with much more room to work in. Household appliance repair type stuff, nothing lightsaber or small scale.

What’s the best way to join and solder something like this?

Any advice or tips appreciated

2

I think if you ask three people what the best way to splice a wire is, you’ll get four answers, or possibly more.

That said, ultimately the methods are the same as you would do it for larger wires, and there are basically two ways to do it:

  1. Pre-tin the wires, add some solder to the iron, hold everything together and join.
  2. Twist wires together, heat up and solder together. This method is more secure, but adds a lot more heat to the wires. If your wires have silicone or PTFE coating, that doesn’t matter much though.

Either way you do it, you’ll want to remember to add the shrink tube before you solder so you can move it into place and shrink it over the joint after splicing.

Sometimes, when joining particularly gnarly wires, I take a single strand from a small wire and use it to tie the wires together first. It’s sort of a variation of “twisting the wires together”, but doesn’t rely on the wires holding themselves in place.

I know MegtoothSith has some videos that shows how he does it (method 1 from above) nothing particularly magic about it, but it’s pretty helpful I think.

Now, I usually prefer to avoid splices if I can and just solder both wires to the same end point instead, but sometimes that is simply not an option.

3

Ok cool. I figured I was overthinking it. I’ll check out those videos. Thank you sir.

4

I worry about all of my splices since on a couple of occasions they’ve been that ‘one last thing’ when trouble shooting. And the heat shrink sometimes adds just a little too much diameter or stiffness. I prefer silicone and I’ve never found a heat shrink that maintains that level of flexibility. Has anyone? Is there a heat shrink that’s particularly flexible?

5

I think a shrink-tube that was that flexible would be counter-productive as it wouldn’t protect the solder-joint very well.

1 Like
6

That’s a good point. A try to trim the shrink-tube to an absolute minimum, but don’t like how it seems to extend the solder joint.