1)
With most wire, if you strip it carefully, you can strip several inches without breaking any strands.
In most cases strands break when you pull because you've nicked them with the stripper or knife.
If you strip carefully, and use a good quality stripper, with a properly sized notch for the wire gauge you're using, you can usually avoid this.
Likewise, if you're using a knife, be very careful to barely touch the metal...
(Some wire tends to strip easily and cleanly while some just won't ever cooperate.)
2)
If you're using fat wire, with fine strands, it's OK if you lose a few.
Just be careful to pull out the loose strands so they don't shift later and short something out.
Then be sure to twist the strands together tightly to avoid loose strands that may short.
3)
If you want to use the wire itself as the jumper then buy yourself a few feet of sleeving that fits loosely on the wire.
You can then -
- strip several inches of the wire
- twist the stripped area tightly to avoid "frizzies"
- feed the wire all the way through the hole in the first binding post
- thread a piece of sleeving long enough to cover the area of the wire between the two sets of binding posts over the wire
- now put the wire through the second binding post
The sleeving doesn't have to be tight since it's just covering a short length of wire between the two sets of binding posts.
You can use heat shrink or something fancier like teflon sleeving...
(And, if you use heat shrink, you don't even have to shrink it into place.)
4)
No... you can't push stranded wire through a hole.
It's more like threading a needle.
And you need to start by twisting the strands together as tightly as you can
5)
As for tinning the wire...
This isn't a bad idea and it will sometimes make things easier... as long as the tinned wire fits through the hole.
NOTE, however, that solder contains flux, which is necessary to properly solder or tin anything.
However, depending on what solder you use, the flux is usually either corrosive, sticky, or both.
Therefore, after tinning the wire, you should clean the tinned ends carefully in a solvent like isopropyl alcohol to remove the flux.
Otherwise you risk corrosion, bad connections, and a sticky mess, later.
Some modern "no clean" fluxes aren't too bad - but you're still far better off cleaning them if you can.
Most no-clean fluxes are actually non-conductive.
This prevents excess flux from causing short circuits between nearby components and pads when you use them to solder things on a circuit board.
However, if you tin something, and then DON'T solder it, but instead connect it mechanically, the flux can cause a POOR electrical connection (just like dirt on the metal).
Therefore, in this situation, you should always clean off the flux as carefully as you can.
6)
Another option altogether is to use spade lugs.
Some goofy "audiophile" spade lugs are huge and require massive amounts of clearance...
However the regular hardware store kind take up very little space and require less clearance than even bare wire.
Most can be either crimped or soldered to the wire - or both.
(Just be sure to get spades that are big enough to fit over the center post of the binding post and big enough to fit the wire you're using on the other end.)
Another thing I’ve done is to use the speaker wire itself as the jumper, this works best if the wire holes in the speaker terminals align vertically. Essentially you strip enough insulation to run the wire through the LF terminal and on through to the HF terminal, then tighten all the terminals down, no jumper required!
This SEEMED like such a good idea, I just felt compelled to try it. And now, I curse
AudioHTIT for even suggesting it.
If your terminals are a significant distance from one another, as mine are, you need to strip well in excess of two inches of insulation for the bare wires to reach between the terminals. If you try to strip that much wire with a knife, the friction of pulling off that much insulation breaks multiple strands of the conductor and you now have a "wire bush" with branches of different lengths sticking out. Even if you twist the different-length strands back into the bundle, the first time you even slightly bend the wire, those strands escape and prevent the bare wire from going through the speaker terminal holes. Second attempt - I used a professional wire stripper tool to strip the insulation. This tool has a "pinch" mechanism that then pulls the insulation off the wire. But it's made for no more than about an inch of insulation. No problem - I pulled off the first inch OK. Then I tried to move back up the wire to pull off the second inch, and the pressure put on the wire insulation by the tool was sufficient to (again) break multiple strands of the wire off at different lengths. Nevertheless, I finally got a wire with at least most of its strands intact and went to insert it in the speaker terminals.
The terminals on my speakers have pretty small holes through the center posts. But at least they were all made so that the terminal holes lined up vertically. So, in theory, just insert the wire, yes? Not so fast, hot rod! The terminal plate on my speakers recesses the terminals into a plastic shell, so that when the speakers are hooked up, nothing protrudes from the back of the speaker. Why the manufacturer did this, I don't know because the speaker has a rear port and can't be placed against a wall anyway, but they did. Furthermore, the terminals had screw retainers that can't be fully taken off of the posts. So now I'm trying to thread wire through a tiny hole that I can't see because of the oversized screw retainers, and that I have to bend the wire to get into the terminal concavity. Needless to say, everything that could go wrong did! The different length strands in the wire twist used the bending to escape and form a bushed wire bundle that would no longer go through the terminal holes. The wire bundle, now reluctant to fit through the too-small hole, caused further bending that pooched out more stray strands. The clearance inside the terminal concavity was insufficient to get my fat fingers into. So I got a needle-nosed pliers to assist. And discovered (once again) that one really can't push stranded wire, only pull it. And of course, since the needle jaws of the pliers were far too big to fit through the tiny holes in the terminal posts for me to grab the wire strands and pull, I finally gave it all up after about 20 wasted minutes.
So my final conclusion is that bare wire can KMA. I'll use spade terminals or bananas, but NEVER want to deal with bare wire again.
Boom
