Heater Wires

[gearhead]

Is there any easy way to place and solder heater wires? I'm using stranded 18 gauge, which is better than the 16 I used before, but it's still taking me waaay longer than I think it should and is still ending up messier than I like.

For ref, am working on a Liverpool. Those closely spaced EL-84 heaters (pins 4 and 5) are nuts.

[Bob-I]

Wiring heaters sucks. There's no shortcuts, unless you want to use buss bars like Soldano, which I've done successfully several times. If you want standard twisted heater wiring you'll simply have to grin and bear it.

[Phil_S]

Some people like to use zip (lamp) cord. This doesn't require any twisting and I understand it works very well. You lay it down on the chassis floor, away from any signal wires. Still, 18 AWG is kinda fat for a noval pin. Grin and bear it, or go down to 20 AWG. Don't go lower than that, and only for smaller current tubes like 12AX7.

[Deric]

This may be helpful...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7O0_dlKkzSE

[Andy Le Blanc]

love the drill.......
heaters are a first step to dressing an amp .....cant skimp
Ive tried straight rails too...... McIntosh used them
should have a section of twisted wire..... to the power tubes at least
the biggest pain can be avoided by chooseing a wire gauge thats appropriate
to the size of the hole on the tube socket pins....... thats parts choice
trying to cram a large gauge stranded wire into a hole thats too small
is a hopeless expedition.....

[strato17]

I got some 20 AWG stranded 600v PVC wire for making my heaters. I didnt have any problems at all.

[butwhatif]

take a piece of some 20 or 22ga stranded or solid wire 3 feet long or so, and clamp the ends in a vise, put the midpoint in a battery drill, pull them tight and spin 'til you are happy, then it's easy to cut lengths that you need

[gearhead]

Thanks all, been a busy week; finally got to read all.

Is Gabriel using pre-tinned with the strands soldered together? The thing that drives me nuts are the stray strands that seem to pop out either when trying to insert in socket or when twisting around to mechanically secure.

I do see that I strip too much of the insulation off. Shorter will make it tighter.

Cute trick with the drill. I actually starting doing that to make flexible mid-size grounding buss wire. Take 3-4 smaller solid wires (sans insulation) and do the same thing.

[strato17]

Now that I think about it, i did use a big heavy roll os solder to hold the twisted wires down and in place while I soldered the ends to the tube terminals.

[drz400]

Is there any easy way to place and solder heater wires? I'm using stranded 18 gauge, which is better than the 16 I used before, but it's still taking me waaay longer than I think it should and is still ending up messier than I like.

For ref, am working on a Liverpool. Those closely spaced EL-84 heaters (pins 4 and 5) are nuts.

Use DC heaters and you dont need to worry about twisting
I have done twisted Heaters to a SLO100 and it certainly does help

[skyboltone]

Is there any easy way to place and solder heater wires? I'm using stranded 18 gauge, which is better than the 16 I used before, but it's still taking me waaay longer than I think it should and is still ending up messier than I like.

For ref, am working on a Liverpool. Those closely spaced EL-84 heaters (pins 4 and 5) are nuts.

I'm with Strato on this one. If there's some mojo going on with 18 guage heater wires I haven't been able to detect it. I don't have golden ears though. As an electrician I've been twisting wire with a drill motor for 40 years.

[Tonegeek]

+1 on the AWG20. I usually wire the power tubes with clippings from the transformer though (its the recycle hippie in me, i guess), which I think is AWG18, but AWG20 should be fine and AWG22 even for the pre's. These are very short runs we are talking about. After seeing some of the gut shots here, I made a commitment to start building better looking stuff (Ayan I am envious!), but still havent quite got the hang of getting the heaters to look good. I think you have to hold your mouth a certain way while you are trying to thread 4 and 5 on the pre's

I will have to try the trick with the drill next time...

Anybody ever done this one: On Marshall replacement PT's from AES the heater wires are orange and black with brown being the center tap. But the HV center tap is black.... I was scratching my head a bit the last week when I got 3 volts on my heaters.... had wired the black wire to ground and the brown wire to the heater

[Structo]

A tip on the preamp tubes where the heater wire is connected to pins 4 & 5.
Take some needle nosed pliers and carefully twist the pins so the holes face each other.
That way it's easier to thread the wire through both of them.

[rfgordon]

Someone on this forum posted a pic of an amp with the heaters wired with straight, naked wire. It looked really neat. So I tried it in an amp, though I put shrink on the wire runs between tubes. It's actually lots faster that way--just strip two long pieces and thread them thru the socket loops and the shrink. Since all my amps are cathode bias, I just reference the heater ground to the top of the power tube cathode. That way the DC makes up for any noise reduction I've lost by not twisting.

[Tonegeek]

A tip on the preamp tubes where the heater wire is connected to pins 4 & 5.
Take some needle nosed pliers and carefully twist the pins so the holes face each other.
That way it's easier to thread the wire through both of them.

I did that on my last amp, but for some reason the sockets in my latest amp did not have enough meat on the pins to line them up. I end up forking the wire (stranded teflon) so that half went to pin 4 and the other half to pin 5. That was a real pain to do so I won't do that again.