Homemade cloth covered wire?

[Dom D]

Has anyone heard of this? Couldn't find much of anything online about it.

[Dom D]

Any ideas are welcome, too. I can sew, if that helps. I figure it involves making very small fabric tubing to wrap the wire with.

[dean owens]

i have nothing to offer but a question.  why would you want to?  cloth wire is pretty cheap just to buy.  is it just because you want to do everything you can possibly do on your own?

[Dom D]

i have nothing to offer but a question.  why would you want to?  cloth wire is pretty cheap just to buy.  is it just because you want to do everything you can possibly do on your own?

Because I'm slightly strange and I like long drawn out tasks of questionable importance.

My girlfriend is a textile designer and makes cool fabrics all day. Wire cloth wire is boring. Paisley cloth wire is more up my alley.

[haveyouseenhim]

Mojo on a whole new level. Wrap some wire in expensive Chinese silk thread.

[Dom D]

Mojo on a whole new level. Wrap some wire in expensive Chinese silk thread.

Yes exactly!

I hate using zip ties and heat shrink so sewing wires in a small piece of cotton or something is an idea i've been kicking around for a while.

It seems most cloth wire has a normal plastic insulation covered by a cloth insulation, and that the cloth can be pushed back pretty easily.

[R.G.]

Any ideas are welcome, too. I can sew, if that helps. I figure it involves making very small fabric tubing to wrap the wire with.

Maybe. The cloth covered wire I'm familiar with has the cloth covering actually woven onto the wire by a system of spools of thread that are rotated around the length of the wire as it's slowly pulled out of a spool in the center of the surrounding thread spools. The thread spools are moved in a circular and crisscrossing way that actually weaves the threads into a cloth covering as they go. It's woven in place. There isn't any sewn tubing in this form. 

I've also seen wire covered with one layer of spiral threads, then a second spiral layer in the opposite direction on top of that.

Both of these would be very, very tedious and difficult by hand.

On the other hand, I *do* know the process to refine copper and iron ore to the metals, if you're interested. 

[Dom D]

Thank you for an interesting response. I'm thinking of cloth wired "push back" wire like what stew mac sells. It seems to be tinned stranded wire, a plastic insulator, and then fabric tubing. I've found a few audiophile diy stuff with pure silver wire and cotton tubing, but I'm not really looking for that. I was speaking more along the lines of the stewmac wire where it seems the cloth is mostly for show and not functional. I guess in my head I was thinking of a length of insulated wire with a long rectangle of fabric than I can stitch around the wire. I have no real free time lately and would test this if I had time. I am literally planning the most epic mojo fuzz and I thought some kind of fancy fabric wrapped wire would be awesome mojo.

[PRR]

Simple "cloth" wire is braided, as R.G. says, with flying spools. If your GF has toured a bric-brac works, she knows how that goes. (Though at full production speed, the eye can't follow.) It is not very different from braiding rope or hair (although hair is easier because it isn't infinite length).

You sure could braid twine around pedal-length wires by hand. I wouldn't, but it can't be worse than knitting sweater sleeves.

Braiding a paisley seems quite hard. I'm not sure how the topology of weaving re-maps to the topology of braiding. And in the last century, "all" paisley is printed, not woven-in. (I suppose you've met exceptions.) It does seem that if the paisley blobs must "read" on a small wire, the threads must be small and numerous. So-called 'tweed' seems more do-able. A simple Tartan might be braidable, if yor ancestry qualifies you for Tartan.

> cloth wire has a normal plastic insulation covered by a cloth

A screw-up in the braiding will leave a thin or bare spot in the cloth insulation. Water will make the insulation a fairly decent conductor. When there was no alternative (crappy rubber and no good plastics), we did cloth. Now that we can do better, the fire/shock codes "require" plastic-level performance. And the easiest way to get that is to use plastic insulation, decorated with cloth.

Wiring inside a guitar pedal, the hazard from shock and fire is quite small. You could insulate with anything you want. If careful, it will even work. Of course in many situations, a pedal can be wired with NON-insulated wire, and after some fussing, it will work.

You can buy old Fender style cloth-cover (no plastic) wire. www.hoffmanamps.com , catalog, wire, "Looks, smells and taste exactly like vintage Fender wire.".

Do you know how bass-strings for piano and guitar are wound? You could use the same type of string-lathe to over-wind electric wire with thread. Thread won't stay snug like wrap-wire, you can shellac or wax it.

Fug fabrics. String beads on a wire. This is actually done in some very high temperature wiring.

I've been wiring a garage. After all these years, plastic NM cable still has a paper wrap inside. Once upon a time, early NM was mostly paper insulation. Some barns burned down when cow-pee soaked up into the paper, so they put plastic in, and today's NM's plastic is 98% equivalent to THHN (you can pull THHN through metal pipe). But there's still paper in there. And it is very nice paper. Follow an electrician, he's throwing 6" scraps of paper-wrap on the floor. Re-cycle re-use re-purpose.

[Dom D]

Awesome information. Thanks. I guess this isn't something I can just jump into like I thought. 

[amptramp]

Many of my antique radios have cloth over rubber insulation for wiring.  The rubber-only wiring is crumbling rapidly after seventy years, but the cloth-covered rubber-insulated wire is still in good shape.  I have a collection of radios going back to 1925.

[davent]

When i read the thread title i immediately thought of the diy cloth covered wire in this project.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDJibf8uZnQ

dave

[haveyouseenhim]

When i read the thread title i immediately thought of the diy cloth covered wire in this project.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDJibf8uZnQ

dave

   I have no words for that.

[davent]

When i read the thread title i immediately thought of the diy cloth covered wire in this project.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDJibf8uZnQ

dave

  I have no words for that.

Now in all seriousness you can get cotton sleeving (or nylon or monofilament)to slip over your wire, does that qualify as DIY?

Cotton sleeving could be dyed and decorated. http://www.doublehelixcables.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=29

More cotton sleeving here in a number of different sizes. http://www.vt4c.com/shop/program/main.php?cat_id=22&group_id=3&hit_cat=

...and some rice paper wraps/sacks to kick it up a notch.http://www.referencetweaks.com/products.htm

[Mike Burgundy]

@Dave: OMG...
Just for fun: one of those braiding machines:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dER8DM3aYqk&feature=related
Different one, exact same principle. You can see the core wire (which in our case would be copper) and how the spindles run. This is why I like mechanics ;P

[pappasmurfsharem]

You should just sleeve your wires like us PC mod people Google MDPC

[Processaurus]

Many of my antique radios have cloth over rubber insulation for wiring.  The rubber-only wiring is crumbling rapidly after seventy years, but the cloth-covered rubber-insulated wire is still in good shape. 

Interesting, I wonder if modern wire insulation is as archival as this?  How long is our wire meant to last?

[R.G.]

Interesting, I wonder if modern wire insulation is as archival as this?  How long is our wire meant to last?

Rubbers derived from latex will deteriorate in 5 - 100 years, depending on how much ozone, UV, an/or latex eating fungi and water vapor are around it. In the tropics in the sun, it's gone pretty quickly. Some of the synthetic rubbers will go much, much longer. UV is especially bad.

Polyvinyl insulation like many modern wires will last a long, long time, as no fungi really likes it, and it can be mixed with UV and/or ozone stabilizers. In a modestly cool, dry, dark place it's effectively immortal as compared to mere humans. The plasticizer chemicals that make it flexible may leach/evaporate out, making it brittle, so it cracks with flexing over time, though. That was a problem with early plastics. I don't know where the state of the art is today.

That may not always be the case. In some people's view, plastics which last semi-forever are a Bad Thing. The word "landfill" is nearly always used when this view of plastics comes up. There are even "bio-degradable" plastics with ingredients mixed in so that they will deteriorate in an earth-normal environment. Probably many people but not the owners of the degradable plastics like this. Watch for laws to be enacted prohibiting use of non-degradable polymers. It can't be that far away.

[PRR]

> one of those braiding machines:

GREAT clip! You can almost see what it is doing!

But that's hobbyists loving their machine. When you love production, it runs like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD8U698yYRU  (actual braiding starts around 1:35)

And that's rope. The smaller the product, the faster they can and must run the machine. Fabric braid, also cloth wire, the dancing spindles are just a blur. (Weavers were pushing the envelope on bearing RPM a long time ago.)

[PRR]

> How long is our wire meant to last?

What's the warranty? (Often none!)

But when early NM failed (unexpectedly) they did change to stuff that didn't fail so fast.

My folks have a house from the late 1930s. The rubber (from rubber-tree) insulation is in very-very bad shape. Say 75 years. This fits R.G.'s 5-100 year number.

In really bad cases the rubber has residual sulphur which attacks the copper.

I have seen thermoplastic line-cords from 1950s and 1960s in very bad shape. Basically brittle plastics softened with plasticizers (think glycerine) which dry out. But these radios and recordplayers were sold on 90-day warranty, new/improved re-styled models every year, nobody was supposed to keep a radio more than a few years, or cry if it aged badly.

In house wiring: pure knob-and-tube will last longer than most buildings. But most K&T includes cloth "loom" to get through framing. The stuff I had from the 1930s was still in good shape, but unless your cellar is as dry as the pyramids it won't last forever.

Not to mention raw Aluminum wire in standard terminations will oxidize continuously, keeps on oxidizing until it gets hot, then burns-up. Aluminum is better than copper in some ways (better conductivity per dollar means smaller budget, better conductivity per pound means longer overhead spans) but there are issues.

A lot of modern house-wire has a very thin jacket of fairly pure Nylon over the cheaper bulk insulation. If not brutally abused it will probably hang-together much longer than you or your kids care.

Historically, houses shed their wires and grow new ones about every 50 years. My old house once had about six outlets. Not enough for modern life even in 1940. Someone retrofitted dozens of outlets and new wires, then more in the 1970s, then I re-did a lot of that. And it was exceptional (being from 1837 and hardly molested). Around it other houses got demolished and replaced with McMansions.