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How's the shipping though?

Group buy?

Yes, it is bare wire.
So 99.99% would probably oxidize then? I guess the cotton would be useless then.

I suppose I could paint them with a protective coating first, but that would make them tacky and a lot more difficult to slide through the sleeving.

Any recommendations for flexible paint? Maybe conformal coating spray of some kind, or some other spray paint?

-Ed

I have another idea. Have bare silver inside the cotton sleeves. Braid the sleeved wires. and then slide the braid into a teflon or some other rubber tube and then seal the ends. Maybe trying to vacuum out the air on one end right before sealing it?

I am thinking of using a combination of adhesive heatshrink and liquid electrical tape to accomplish the air tight seal. I probably won't be able to maintain a vacuum in there, but I'd be able to keep it air tight at least.

-Ed

Buy some aerosol hairspray! Give it a light coat, and it should stop most of the oxidation. Make sure it dries before you thread the cotton sleeve over it. If your wire is thin enough say 30-33awg, then oxidation isn't a big factor in sound. Oxidation on silver wire is ok, just not oxidation on copper wire.

Another way is to get some plumber's teflon tape (get these for like .99c each at HomeDepot) and do a tight wrap around your wire. Tedious work...but with a good wrap, it should starve off most of the oxidation.

Maybe you should thread your cotton+wire through teflon tubing, and seal off the ends.


Good luck Ed.

Doesn't need to be a vacuum, which is very hard to achieve anyways... Just making it sealed will do the trick. If you are planning on sealing teflon, I suggest using a heated knife and melt the opening shut, and then for good measures either CA glue and/or adhesive heatshrink.


Your idea is excellent too, thread your braided cotton/silver wire through teflon tubing or something else...use PVC tubing. Decent qualities and it's cheap. Way more flexible than PTFE.

Ed,

What the heck are you doing anyways? Are you making ICs or re-wiring your brain?


Um, you mentioned you were going to make XLR cables...LOL
Talk about me being dense...

My bot needs new wires too.



J/K

-Ed

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I was thinking clear PVC tubes like the aquarium water ones. Teflon that big is pretty expensive and more difficult to get/work with.

I could either wrap some more techflex around the clear PVC tube, or just leave it with the PVC tube on the outside, depending on how it looks when I'm done.

You're right about silver oxidation, it's a problem for the surface of connectors, not the wire itself. But there's nothing wrong with overkill.

-Ed

I just got the thin wall 22AWG teflon from Action Electronics. The 22AWG solid silver wire slides in very easily.

The thickness is just about right. I guess the nominal thickness ones are for wires that would get a LOT of abuse or something.

-Ed

Ebonyks statement is correct, mostly. Actually, the best dielectric is a perfect vacuum. There are three primary factors to consider. Permativity, distance, and breakdown. Capacitance between two conductors is proportional to the permativity of the dielectric divided by the distance between them. So even using a dielectric with low permativity, if two wires are twisted together, and the dielectric is very thin, the capacitance can still be high. And that is assuming the voltage per unit thickness does not exceed the breakdown voltage for the dielectric. So in that case, a medium thickness would probably be best. If a wire is not right next to any other conductor, I would go as thin as practical. I woud only go thick when very high voltages are involved - like some tube stuff. Teflon does has a very low permativity. But that is not the only reason it is an excellent dielectric. Unknown to most people, the permativity of any dielectric is not constant. It is actually a function of frequency. Thus all capacitance is inherently non-linear, to some degree or another. The permativity of telfon is also fairly constant through the audio frequencies. Which gives rise to low distortion at those frequencies. Air and vacuum are also superior in this respect.

99.99 purity doesn't seem very high. According to Venhaus, purity is key too good sound. Who knows though, just let us know how it turns out.

99.99% purity should be good enough for anyone. The difference between 99.99% and 99.999% is so little that if you hear a difference your ears are undoubtedly better than mine.

Plus, good luck finding 99.999% purity silver at a reasonable price.

BTW, 99.99%, .9999, or four nines as it's known is pure enough to eat.

Uh, not that I find pure silver particularly tasty.....

-Ed

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It will be some time before I go insane and buy a vacuum chamber to assemble my IC's.

Yes, and that is in Edwood time.

-Ed

Another insane, but not quite as insane idea: Use all bare wires (carefull to keep them seperated) inside a sealed air tight enclosure filled with nitrogen at standard pressure. Then there are no oxidation problems. And no pressure differential. Which would drastically lower the chance of leaks.

Once bought a pair of Kimber Select speaker cables. Super expensive. The case they came in was filled with nitrogen at roughly half standard pressure. Which helped keep it closed. I could not open it. There was a little screw on the side. The screw hole went all the way through. So when you removed it, the pressure would equalize, and you could then open the case.