Electric Wire Cutter

If you are smoking meters, then you picked the wrong industry to be a part of.

There is as always the spring wound trip latch mechanism. Small motor winds up the spring slowly, trip latch releases stored energy to cut wire.

It's been a while, but it wasn't very expensive at all.

The wire supplier considered it a value-added service-- and another way to sell their wire-- just run it through a CNC automated machine first. Pennies per piece, plus the cost of the wire in relatively small lots.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

That's too easy. Use your imagination. If the wire isn't jacketed or insulated, a simple anvil can gouge a V notch into the wire. Run about 100 Amps thru the wire, and it will fuse at the notch. It's slower than a cutter, but far more fun to watch.

Another approach is to use a rotary grinding tool, such as a Dremel abrasive cuttoff tool. That's roughly how I cut big heavy multi-conductor cables. It also works like a salami cutter. However, the same approach can be used with smaller wires. Having the disk spin across the face of a mandrel should work. For small diameters, just make sure the wire is tight when cutting.

For an economy cutter, a common office stapler can probably be converted into a wire guillotine. Insert a piece of spring steel, with a sharpened edge in place of the staple. Do some grinding to the base to form a proper die. To cut, an eccentric cam or solenoid pushing on the top of the stapler should work.

Since accuracy and consistency seems to be the controlling specification, using the motor feed to determine length is a bad idea due to slippage. Merely install a backstop at the desired distance. When the wire hits the backstop, hit the guillotine. As long as the wire remains reasonably straight, it should produce consistent cuttings.

For the ultimate in cutting consistency, simply zig-zag the wire between two rows of alignment pins. The pin seperation should be somewhat longer than the desired cut length. When the bundle of wires become sufficiently large, just hit both ends with the cutter. If piled neatly, every wire should be identical because they're all being cut at once. Yeah, there's some ecologically incorrect waste, but sacrifices must be made in order to win the $5 DVM.

I still prefer the pick and place robot holding a meat cleaver approach.

I just realized that two feed mechanisms are needed. If only a pull mech is used, what happens at the moment of a cut?

Same for push fed.

Either way, a nice, funnel shaped feed "tube" die is needed to ensure that the each new "wire prod" gets fed properly into the system after each cut. It seems to me that the cutter needs to be in the center of such a die so that when the cut piece motion occurs, the rest of the wire is still in the die,and the measuring transducer is still in the process. So, a chopper wheel that ties feed rate and cut length together with its rotational speed so that a cut takes place at the right moment.

And yes, in a die with the right tolerances a simple shear cut can be performed without turning the end of the wire, as was described as problematic earlier.

you can get TC servoes that have quite alot of torque, easy to drive easy to mount easy to get.

you can modify them for continues rotating so they could be used for the feed too

-Lasse

No, idiot. Two or three meters a week for exceptional work on one project or another.

It is called VATEA funding out of the Perkins money, fool. Don't tell me what funding I get and don't get.

I said I had half a dozen of them, blowhard.

Grade for reading comprehension: F. Grade for understanding beginning students: F.

You wouldn't last long in my class.

Jim

I do not, nor would not consider the shit you call a curriculum class work, nor the place you hold it "a classroom". Mainly because it is you at the helm.

Your capacity for assessing my reading comprehension, as well as your capacity to assess my capacity to understand students, at any level, hovers at nil.

A robot with hands and a StripMaster(tm)? ;-)

Cheers! Rich

They are on sale for $2.09 right now.

The batch I bought a while back were yellow. The current ad shows them in the red case.

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The red cased ones have a pushbutton backlight as I recall, while the yellow case ones were a little better on battery life.

They come with a battery, by the way. Try and find the battery itself (9v) for $2.09 apiece, no less the multimeter.

Jim

There was a yellow model with a backlight, for a couple months. They probably switched to the red plastic because it's cheaper at the moment. Or to keep people from buying a new one and trying to return an old one in the new box.

Has anyone tried their analog sound level meter?