Soldering requires a steady hand and many attempts before mastery.
If you want to make something that glows in reaction to an electrical current without using a filament, you may consider using electroluminescent (EL) wire. Soldering EL wire, much like soldering small electronic components, requires plenty of practice and a steady hand. If you have little or no experience soldering, you should master soldering copper wire before beginning to solder EL wire. The process, though similar, has a few differences which might intimidate you.
Instructions
1. Strip the electrical insulation around the wire up to the point where you would like to solder the wire. Use a wire stripper for the most convenience. Pull the two small wires near the core wire out of the way and twist them together into a braid.
2. Strip the coating around the core wire to expose the copper. Using a knife or other blade is best.
3. Strip the insulation from your inverter's main cable. You will notice two smaller wires inside. Strip the insulation from those wires as well. Remember, you should only strip the amount of cabling you want to solder.
4. Place the two cables you would like to solder on a two-arm wire holder and put a quarter-inch of shrink tubing around the EL wire and a bit of a one-eighth-inch shrink tubing around the red inverter wire.
5. Twist the red inverter wire around the EL wire's main copper conductor.
6. Hold a thin piece of solder around the conductors and heat it with your soldering gun, allowing the solder to cover the conductors.
7. Slide the quarter-inch shrink tubing to the area you just soldered and heat with a heat shrink gun.
8. Solder the small conductors you put aside from the EL wire to the white --- sometimes black --- wire from the inverter using steps five and six as a reference. Slide the one-eighth-inch tubing around the soldered point when you finish and shrink it with a heat shrink gun. Your EL wire will illuminate as soon as electrical current hits.
Tags: around wire, shrink tubing, tubing around, core wire, electrical current