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Comment by p1mrx | Hacker News Reader

He was lucky that the headphones used standard rubber insulation. It's common for headphones to use bare copper wire coated with some sort of insulating lacquer, that can't be stripped mechanically.

The best way I've found to remove such insulation is to light it on fire, which would be frowned upon during a flight.

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That's "enameled wire", also known as "magnet wire".

You can sand the insulation off with an emery board, commonly found in nail care kits.

You can also scrape it off with a blade. Just don't use one you care about, because the metal dulls blades quickly.

There's an old trick there (not for use on commercial flights...), if you place the enamelled copper on an asprim tablet and briefly touch them with a soldering iron, it almost magically becomes clean solderable shiny copper.

(Source: I rewound _so_ many CD Rom drive motors into model airplane motors back before you could buy them easily... I think my knowledge of that asprin trick predates that by a decade or more though...)

THANK YOU

So many headphones to fix. So many Litz-wire inductor cores in Class-D amplifiers to solder. Thanks.

Off-Topic: any chance you've got some literature on the subject of turning CDROM drive motors into model airplane motors? This sounds like a great hack for HN ..

I am wondering if he is this guy:

http://www.flyelectric.ukgateway.net/cdrom.htm

That's not me, but that's pretty much exactly the process... It was pretty common maybe 10 years back - these days there's a huge range of purpose-build brushless motors available from places like HobbyKing.com for such small amounts of money that I suspect _nobody_ of spending all that time to make their own (at least not in the "saving a few bucks for my hobby" class, I think the top end competition guys are probably hand making motors still...)

Wow, that's a trick worth knowing. I've tried everything, but this sounds promising.

The aspirin trick works wonders. However, the resulting smoke doesn't smell like roses. Just remember not to breathe it :)

Heh, reminded me immediately of the will it blend guy.

"Asprin smoke, don't breath this!"

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