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I have a wire that fits atop my 9 V battery and it should easily feed into a breadboard but it does not as the wire is stranded.

I tried last week to solder these wire strands to breadboard jumper wires so I could feed them into my bread board, but they just don't allow current to flow through; this did not work despite my efforts and even using heat shrink.

Is there a component that would do this better or some soldering technique I should be using instead?

leeand00
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    Show a photo of your crime. – Transistor Sep 16 '22 at 21:03
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    Cheese is a poor conductor of electricity. You should consider using copper battery wires. – JYelton Sep 16 '22 at 21:06
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    Lee, are you just saying you wish you had one of these? – jonk Sep 16 '22 at 21:08
  • @jonk For sure! – leeand00 Sep 16 '22 at 21:08
  • if forced to guess I'd say the wires or the breadboard are damaged. – Jasen Слава Україні Sep 16 '22 at 21:08
  • @Jasen No I didn't jam them in the breadboard...I soldered them together with a pair of stiff wires like you'd normally jam into a breadboard. – leeand00 Sep 16 '22 at 21:10
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    @leeand00 You can buy them already done up like that. Or, you can peal back the top side thin plastic on your 9V connector and cut the stranded wire away from there and replace it with solid wires and then superglue the plastic toupee back together, again. Screwing around with a solid wire and stranded wire joint in the middle just leaves you with a weak joint that will cause no end of trouble. – jonk Sep 16 '22 at 21:10
  • @jonk Sweet I'll give it a try. – leeand00 Sep 16 '22 at 21:13
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    You can also solder the stranded wires to a couple pins of a 2.54mm/0.1" pitch header and plug that into the breadboard. Use some heat shrink to increase the bend radius at the solder's edge if you want it to last. – Spehro Pefhany Sep 16 '22 at 21:13
  • @Transistor I'll send you a photo when I can find it. I really need to buy a lighter as I've done heat shrinking before, but it didn't turn out to well this time given that I didn't have a lighter. – leeand00 Sep 16 '22 at 21:14
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    Heatshrink is an insulator. That will have no effect on conductivity other than preventing short circuits. It's your soldered joint that is the problem or the type of wire you have selected. What are the "hard wires" made of? They should be copper. If you can't solder to them with resin-cored solder and a decent, hot enough soldering iron then you've got something else. – Transistor Sep 16 '22 at 21:18
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    You could get any used battery disassemble it and use the Top part. Then weld wires to any + 16V electrolytic capacitor (radial is better), wind and solder the flexible wire on the capacitor terminals. This provides two features: (1) gives you 2 “rigid” wires for polarized connection on the breadboard, and (2) provides you a filtering capacitance to lower internal resistance and make 9V more stable, being useful in +90% of the circuits you may assemble. Cost: negligible, Fun: see how a 9V battery is made inside. – EJE Sep 16 '22 at 21:29
  • You can use the barrel of a soldering iron to do the heat shrink if you don't happen to have a proper temperature-controlled heat gun. – Spehro Pefhany Sep 16 '22 at 21:43
  • @SpehroPefhany Yeah that's what I tried to do; wait till you see my picture. – leeand00 Sep 16 '22 at 22:52
  • This looks good didn't know it was a thing.

    https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/217671/2956

     – leeand00 Sep 16 '22 at 22:52
  • @leeand00 I know what you mean and many EE's also do. BUT some don't. A photo of your stranded wire would help. – Russell McMahon Sep 19 '22 at 02:58
  • Best to follow other better advice in comments :-) - BUT - scrape stranded wire until oxide free. Solder strands with lots of solder fed in and MAYBE some NONACID flux until SOME solder adheres properly - the more the better. THEN wrap stranded wire around jumper tip and solder with lots of solder until it takes. Cover with heat shrink or tape to hide the mess and prevent shorting. It works, BUT best not done at all. – Russell McMahon Sep 19 '22 at 03:02

1 Answers1

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This is how I connect small stranded wire to solid wire so I can plug it in to a breadboard.

Joint

Note that the stranded wire, in your case the wire from the battery, is wrapped around the sold wire about 5 mm from the end of the solid wire. With heat shrink around the assembly, this will support the stranded wire against the solid wire so the stranded wire won't break when flexed.

Be sure that the soldering flux is removed from the exposed solid wire as the flux will cause poor electrical contact in the breadboard. Isopropyl alcohol will remove the flux.

If you are using cheap breadboards, you will have problems with high resistance connections due to the poor quality of the contacts in the breadboard.

qrk
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