How to Remove the Coat From Copper Wires

Copper wires are found in electrical cables, and come in various thicknesses, or gauges, to server circuits with required levels of amperage. Each copper wire is surrounded with a plastic, colored coating, which protects the wire and stops it from touching other wires in the cable and causing a short. The exception to this is the ground wire, which is usually bare, though sometimes has a green plastic coating. These wires are covered with an outer plastic sheathing. Removing the outer sheathing is done with a utility knife, and each wire's coating is taken off with a wire stripper.

Utility knife
Wire stripper

Instructions

- 1
  Run the tip of a utility knife blade along the entire length of the electrical cable, on one side of its outer sheathing. The blade should enter through the sheathing, but not cut through the plastic coated wires inside. Pull off the sheathing from its inside wires.
- 2
  Separate the wires that were inside the sheathing. Open the handles of a wire stripper. Look along the stripper's jaws for a series of marked grooves that fit various gauges of electrical wire. Rest one of the plastic-coated wires in the corresponding groove, roughly 2 inches from the end of the wire.
- 3
  Squeeze the handles together for the stripper's jaws to cut through the wire's plastic coating. Continue holding the stripper's handles together, and push the stripper toward the end of the wire to remove its 2-inch section of plastic coating. Strip off the next 2 inches of plastic from the wire by following the same process. Continue in like fashion until all of the wire's plastic coating is removed. Strip off all the other wires' coating in the same way.

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