Before crimping a terminal onto the end of a wire, you’ll first need to strip some insulation off of the end, and that’s exactly what we are going to cover here in lesson #3 of this Wire Terminals playlist. My name is Nate, and welcome to the EXPLORIST.life Mobile, Marine, and Off-Grid Electrical Academy.

Stripping wire is super simple, given you have the right tools, so I’m going to share MY personal choices for the right tools for the job.

Wire Stripping 101 – VIDEO

Stripping Small Wire (22 to 10AWG)

I’ll consider ‘small’ wire to be anything smaller than 10AWG, and for this, I like self-adjusting wire strippers.

With these, we can simply put the wire into the jaws, squeeze the handle, and the tool does the work for us.

These are great because of how fast they are to strip different sizes of wire back-to-back without changing anything.  I can strip the insulation from 16 AWG, and then without changing anything, strip the insulation from 10 AWG.

Stripping Mid-Sized Wire (8 AWG to 6 AWG & Solar Wire)

For wires from 8 AWG to 6 AWG I reach for my Klien 11053 wire strippers.

With these, we can just match up the wire size with the label on the strippers, squeeze the handles, and pull the insulation off of the end.

Sometimes, you may have to squeeze it twice from two different angles if the insulation is being stubborn.

Some of the wire found in shop.explorist.life is SGX battery wire, which has a fairly tough insulation on it that is sometimes hard to strip off; so a tip here, is to use these Klein 11053 wire strippers to cut the insulation; and then squish the wire into the self adjusting strippers to help give some leverage to pull the insulation off of the wire.

I also use these Klein 11053 wire strippers for solar wire.  Solar wire has a REALLY tough thick insulation on it since it’s exposed to the outside elements and the adjusting wire strippers won’t take it off without help.  So, I’ll cut the insulation – then use the adjustable strippers to finish pulling the insulation off the wire.

Stripping Large Wire (4 AWG to 4/0)

If you’ve followed EXPLORIST.life for a while, you’ve seen me recommend this cable knife for stripping wire larger than 4 AWG and in all honesty… it’s still a good tool… but I never use it as it simply takes too long and I also feel I’m not personally as accurate with it.

Instead; I’ll use the same Klein 63030 coaxial cutters that I used to cut the wire.

I’ll just put the wire into the cutters, apply some light pressure, and spin the wire in the cutters until I’ve cut nearly all the way through the insulation, then pull the insulation off the wire.

The important thing here is to not cut too deeply because you don’t want to cut off any of the fine strands of the wire.

It would definitely be in your best interest to practice this a time or three on a scrap piece of wire before doing it for real on your measured and cut wire.

Stripping Multi-Conductor Wire

You’ll likely have multi-conductor wire in your electrical system somewhere, whether it’s 10/2 romex, 12/3 Stranded, or 6/3 SO cord.

For all of these, I don’t have any different tools.

For 10 AWG – 3 conductor wire and smaller, I’ll use my adjustable wire strippers to cut the sheath off of the cable.

This may take two separate ‘bites’ from either side of the wire; but this is the easiest way.

For larger wire, if it’s round, I’m going to strip the outer sheath off of the wire the same way I did large wire insulation.  Light pressure on the Klein 63030 coaxial cutters until the insulation is cut almost all the way through, and then pull it off, taking special care to not cut the insulation of the internal wires.

Once the outer sheath is cut off, the internal wires are stripped based on what gauge they are just like we’ve previously discussed.

If it’s a large-flat wire; I’m simply going to use a knife to cut between the inside strands… and then cut the insulation off.

How Far Back to Strip Wire?

There’s no one right answer for how far back to strip the insulation from wire as it depends on what the wire is being connected to, but here are some tips that may help:

Sometimes the user manual of the device or component will tell you how far back to strip the insulation.

Sometimes the actual component will tell you how far back to strip the insulation.

If neither of those are options, just use the physical barrel length of the crimp terminal and a pen to help decide how far back to strip the insulation.

If it’s a screw terminal and you aren’t using a ferrule, I’ll just stick a screwdriver into the terminal of the device when the power is off, mark the screwdriver, then transcribe that mark to the wire.

Conclusion

To summarize all of this, here is a graph of what wire strippers I use for various sizes of wires.

With just 3 basic hand tools; one of which you would already have from our ‘wire cutting 101’ video, you’ll be able to strip the insulation from any wire you’ll encounter for your next mobile, marine, or off-grid electrical project.

We are going to be stripping wires throughout the rest of this academy, so be sure to bookmark this lesson for future reference and come back to it if you need a refresher because going forward, I’ll just assume that you now know how to strip wires

Now that you know how to strip wires, I’m going to teach you everything you need to know about heat shrink.  Click up here to watch, and I’ll see you over there