stripping wires with your teeth

I would be slightly worried about carcinogenic substances in the mouth after chewing on cables. I even regularly wash my hands after handling soldering related equipment. All the lead can't be good.

Breathing solder fumes though, I read it "only" causes asthma, so I still do it without any fancy ventilators.

pucho812 said:

lazy man I know was installing phone jacks. Wire strippers over on the table far away from where the jack was going so he did that with his teeth and got shocked

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Been there....not stripped a single wire with my teeth since!

I don't like any kind of 'lectric shock, the kind that comes from phone lines is the worst (low freq AC....yuckkity).

C

Have not done that since I traded the woodburning tool and plumbing solder for the real stuff around age 12.
UTP, well, I just strip that with my thumbnail.
Mike

Shouldn't this thread be renamed 'stripping teeth with wires'?

Hehehehehe , i stripped my teeth with wires a lot when i was a kid !

Now, i have all my front teeth saw-shaped !

Man, not quite off topic, but I HATE stripping Teflon coated wire. Absolutely hate it. None of my strippers can do it cleanly!

Yep - did it al the time as a kid and occasionally still do.

I'm half-surprised someone hasn't yet claimed that they can strip both the outer and inner jackets of shielded cable and completely unbraid the shield that way.  ;D  

Silvas said:

Now, i have all my front teeth saw-shaped !

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Me too. My dentist seriously told me this is not good for my teeth!

riggler said:

Man, not quite off topic, but I HATE stripping Teflon coated wire. Absolutely hate it. None of my strippers can do it cleanly!

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I stopped using teflon "decorations" for this reason. I just don't see the point.

I had a friend many years ago (long before I even considered music as a career)
who was stripping speaker wire with his front teeth. I remember very clearly
him breaking his front tooth in half.
I called him "gappy" after that...

Never ever considered using teeth for stripping (wire) purposes after that incident.

When younger, I had various chips in my teeth that allowed me to strip different gauges of insulation i.e. 18AWG was between incisors, whereas,  22 AWG was between incisor and canine!, but I performed this act only in an emergency.

I can't recommend it as a sustainable practice. eventually a single strand of copper may enter your gums, if it has any corrosion, could cause infection..... 

riggler said:

Man, not quite off topic, but I HATE stripping Teflon coated wire. Absolutely hate it. None of my strippers can do it cleanly!

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Teflon insulation? No problem.
One of my favourite tools is a surgical scalpel. Made by Swann Morton with '10A' blade. They cost next to nothing, work beautifully,
the blades are cheap, and inflicted cuts are painless :-\

I use this.

Thermal Wire Stripper.



Fast and easy, and no worries about nicking the wire.

I am serious on this. When I was a kid one of my father's electricians used to not only strip wires that are like 4mm thick, but  eat glass too. Totally true. One day we were all sitting and drinking tea in the stores and he said he ate glass. Everybody kind of went "yeah". He said he did. People were going "yeah sure". He said bets were open and everybody did. He finished his tea and crunched the whole glass like a candy, except the bottom. I mean I would be exteremely worried going to the toilet for a dump afterwards but, he was like "gimme more".

Eugh!



  I have a recurring dream about waking up and finding shards of glass stuck in my throat, and pulling them out . . . . . PLEASE don't tell me that someone actually DOES it . . . ..



    aaaaagh!



    ANdyP


   

Dang, I'll bet that guy also used two callused sausage fingers on one of his ham hands to test presence of 240vac.

Ah! That used to be the usual trick of checking if the wire was alive. Not joking. We used to call it "give it a slap". When we did not have the control pen/light pen that is what we did. I actually used to hold live wire comfortably standing on a bit of timber. However, if you went out on a job with my elder brother and forgot the control pen or any other tool, live wire would not be the only one who whould get the "slap". He would whack you. One day on a job, wiring a shop, his pliers were lost and he sacked the guys who were with him. Last year when I was in Istanbul he told me that after almost thirtyfive years the mystery was solved. It was actually the shop owner who nicked his pliers and confessed to him. But the poor guys got it on the neck.  

I have also been doing it for 20+ years but it only works for some outers. Mains cables is a bit of a no-no as it's generally too thick and tough. And some stuff is too plastic and goes stringy and unattractive.

I met a wiring guy the other day who had just been to the dentist to have half a tooth glued back on.

I generally just spin the cable lightly over a stanley blade and then give it a pull if it looks like being trouble

sahib said:

He finished his tea and crunched the whole glass like a candy, except the bottom.

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I met two young guys who break glasses with their teeth when I was in a bar on holydays, there must be a trick as they seemed to do that easily. They even said in their region they knew a lot of young men who do the same. But they did not break the whole glass though, only a part of it