Chinese wire processing machines - any experiences?

[Corporate666]

@Corporate666 and @rx8Pilot : did either of you mod your machine for finer gauge wire in the end? I also need hundreds of lengths of cut and stripped wire that needs to be precise to the nearest mm, so cutting and stripping by hand is really unnattactive.

In my situation though the wire is 26AWG, and 0.8/0.9 mm total outer diameter. Reading your posts you both think it cant handle 26AWG out of the box but can be modified to do so. have either of you made the modification?

What about 26AWG with very thin insulation?

cheers,
 Kevin.

No way the machine will do thin jacketed 26GA wire. 

I have actually been pretty frustrated with the machine... I took it apart to try to put a smaller gear on the strip mechanism (to get finer resolution), but the LCD stopped working - i was very careful in my work, so it's likely just a bad solder joint somewhere.

There are a few problems with the machine that will prevent it working for you.  First, the resolution setting in the menu isn't fine enough.  On 22ga wire, one setting will have it not stripping, and the next increment will have it cutting a few of the inner strands of the wire.

The only way to get around this is to loosen the blades and then try to tweak their position.  The issue there is that the blades don't necessarily end up straight/parallel after this, and furthermore the top and bottom blade both need to be at the right position, or the top (or bottom) of the wire can be barely nicked and the other side will be cut much too far through.  To make this adjustment, you need to make tiny tiny changes, and really, you are just loosening the blade and trying to barely nudge it and then run some wire and see how it works.  It's painstaking and can take a couple of hours of fiddling with it just to try to get it working.  And as the blades wear, it will stop cutting correctly, and then you need to go through this whole process again.

I have been thinking of making some sort of blade holder with a couple of fine pitch screws to adjust the blade position in tiny increments, but I also think I could spend a week coming up with a mechanism and machining it, or I could just spend more money and buy a higher-end machine and have it just work.

Bottom line - I would absolutely not recommend this machine for 26ga wire, and I would say it's borderline for even 22ga wire.  18ga is fine, 20ga should be OK but may need a little tweaking.

[n0f8r]

Many thanks @Corporate666 and @rx8Pilot, not really what I wanted to hear, but you probably saved me money, time and frustration.