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zdashamberSo! I took a class on EL wire at The Crucible. Upshot: if you can solder, you can make stuff with EL wire. And soldering is really, really simple.
So, EL wire has a solid wire core, about the gauge of a heavy-duty twisty tie, perhaps twice that of a normal twisty tie. This core wire is covered by phosphorescent caked-on powder that is insulating. Spiraled around the outside of the powder coating are two hair-fine wires, finer than the wires you'll find in individual Christmas lightbulbs, almost hard to see. That's all you really need for an EL wire. That contraption is encased in a vinyl sheath, which is as narrow as EL wire gets; at that gauge it's called "angel wire". The standard size EL wire is the next step up from that: the angelwire sheath encased in another vinyl sheath that makes the whole thing about 3 mm wide. Next up from that is "Fat" EL wire, which I assume is just another sheath thicker, and then "Ultra Fat" wire for another sheath past that. The UltraFat is, from what I remember, a titch more than a quarter-inch wide. The actual light production does not change; the only point of wider wire is to make the light appear "wider" at close range, and to have extra UV protection for the wire.
Oh hey, I have the catalog of the teachers here. It says that the diameters are 1.2 mm for angel wire, 2.3 mm for standard wire, 3.2 mm for "phatt" wire. There's also high brightness EL wire, which is in fact brighter than the normal stuff, because it has more phosphor powder on it, so it's wider as well: standard is 2.5 mm, and phatt is 5.0 mm.
There are two colors that EL wire glows: aqua, and white. All other colors are made by skinning the wire with different colored vinyl sheaths. The white, when unlit, looks pink.
All you need to make an EL wire glow is to run power from the core wire through the phosphorescent coating to the hairfine outer wires. The wire glows brightest at 2000 Hz: any more Hz than that just burn it out faster without making it brighter... Not that it's going to burn out anyway, since they last 2000 hours, and who has it lit that long? Running it at lower Hz, like the 60 that comes from the American wall, makes it very dim. It was incredibly noisy in the classroom, but the guy might have said that EL wire likes 103 volts best.
Anyway, the simplest way to fiddle around with this stuff involves soldering the EL wire to a premade connector, which links to a premade connector on the driver, the driver being the black box that contains a transformer to either make the DC power from batteries into AC power at high Hz, or make the low Hz stuff from a wall into high Hz stuff. It's trivial to buy drivers that also have built-in battery-holding places and switches for on, off, and perhaps blink. The drivers may have other electronic doodads inside... They didn't go into enough detail there to suit me, and I haven't yet broken open the one they gave us. But right, so soldering the EL wire to the connector means you can disconnect it to swap it out, or to sew it onto things or whatever. The connector is roughly the size and shape of a modern American telephone jack. The ones we had had about 5" of wire, but I believe there's also the option of soldering a whole lot of normal wire in there in case you want your battery pack 30 feet from the stuff that lights up. Any wire will do, so long as there are two wires isolated from each other.
The drivers are rated for the length of EL wire they can light; any length of wire leading to that EL wire is basically free, or at least one of the instructors had used the aforementioned 30' with no visible change in EL intensity. The EL wire can be of any gauge since they're all in fact the same mechanically, and the EL wire can be all in a line, or parallel in some sort of wacky EL featherduster.
What you need:
-a soldering iron
--which maybe has a place for a damp sponge
--also maybe a dish with brass-looking metal wool in it
---these are for cleaning solder globs off the hot tip. I was fine with just wiping it on the sponge to get everything off. Doesn't seem to affect the heat of the tip in any major way.
---the soldering iron had a pointy tip like a pencil, but one with a chisel-looking tip like for stained glass would probably work fine also
---the ones we were using had their own spring-looking sheath rests for when you're not using it
---apparently it was a 30-70 watt iron
-solder: 60/40 rosin core
--the rosin is the "flux", a necessary part of soldering, I don't know why, but straight-up melting metal doesn't work without perhaps the flux to float it along to the right places? Anyway, there is also acid-core solder, which is for plumbing, since the acid will keep eating away at electronics, but apparently for plumbing you can wash it off. Anyway, rosin core stuff smells heavenly, so that's really nice. Probably the 60/40 refers to lead/tin; I hear non-leaded solder is crap and brittle. However, the lead part is probably why you are supposed to solder in a ventilated area, so as to breathe as little fuming lead as possible. But pssh, we're talking less than an inch of solder necessary to make six connections.
-wire cutters
-wire strippers, maybe
-1 pair of needlenose pliers
-a blade, perhaps in one of those small pen-weight holders
-"helping hands" / "third hand" = at least 2 alligator clamps on sticks sticking up, where you can clip things while you have solder in one hand and an iron in the other
-scissors
-copper tape
-heat-shrink tubing in various widths, like 3/16", 1/8", 3/32"; it comes in many colors and clear. Or I guess you could use electrical tape, but that seems less tidy.
-a hairdryer or fancy heatshrinker blower thing that seems like the same idea but smaller and more tech-looking
-a glue gun
-hot glue sticks for the glue gun
-EL wire
-lightwire side snap release connector
-driver side snap release connector, hooked to a driver one hopes
-batteries for the driver
So, you score the vinyl sheath of the EL wire with the wire stripper, about 1.5 cm from the end, and you tug the vinyl sheath off, exposing the guts of the wire. Or at least, that's how I did it; score by twisting around outside of sheath, reach into score with fingernails, pull sheath off. I know some people do the score and pull with the same implement, but I couldn't get that to work.
With any skill both hairfine wires are still there; one is all you need, though. You cut a bit of the copper tape that's about 1/2 inch by 4 mm, and peel off the paper backing, and stick one end of the tape to the vinyl sheath of the EL wire right by the cut. You fold the hairfine wires down over the copper and solder them there.
About soldering: seriously, this is massively simple. In your left hand you have the flux-cored wire of solder pointing at your thing; in your right hand you have a hot soldering iron. The tip of the soldering iron is smooth and crap free. You touch the soldering iron to the metal thing, heating the thing up a tiny bit, and you bring the solder down to that area. The solder melts pretty much instantaneously, and I believe it flows towards the heat... Probably a wicking thing from the flux evaporating in an aromatic puff? Anyway, you can use the iron to smooth the solder around a bit since it's all liquid. If the wire of solder solidifies stuck onto the metal thing, a touch of the iron frees it. The idea is to flow the solder in a small smooth area, without pointy bits. It solidifies almost as quick as it melts, and it is ok to touch quicker than candle wax, like less than 30 seconds I believe.
Anyway, so then you curl the rest of the copper tape around the circumference of the EL wire, hopefully making a 4mm more than 360 degree band of copper at the end of the vinyl. You fold the hairfine wires back up and solder them again, just to make the connection even stronger. Ideally, hairfine wires will not be hanging out into space; clip 'em off.
You have a core wire to deal with now. Use the blade to scrape the phosphor off the end, like about a quarter inch scraped off all around the wire, since remember it will block the flow of electricity otherwise. Use the needlenose pliers to make a hook.
Does your lightwire side snap connector have wires of slightly different lengths? If not, make it so, and strip about a quarter inch of insulation off both ends. One wire should be about 1.5 cm longer than the other wire. See, the short wire will connect to the core wire, and the long wire will connect to the copper band/hairfine wires, and the connection will not short out because the snap connector wires will still have their insulation and the core wire has most of its insulating phosphor.
Put a hook in the short wire of the connector, too, and hook it to the core wire of the EL wire. Draw this out between the two alligator clamps of the helping hand, and maybe pinch the mechanical connection you've made here closed to make it even stronger yet. Then solder it.
Then connect the longer wire of the connector to the copper band: put some solder on them both, poke them together, and add more solder, keeping the wires together for the seconds until it sets. Clip off or melt off any pointy bits that might poke through the insulating heatshrink tubing you'll be adding once you've checked it.
Plug it in to see if it works.
Cut a bit of heatshrink tubing that will cover the whole area with about 4 mm on each side extra, slide it onto the wire, and use heat to shrink it on. Perhaps to make this even more rugged, you could put a dab of hot glue in the area before sliding on the heatshrink tubing, and then the heat that shrinks the tubing will also remelt the hot glue around everything.
The other end of the EL wire is lying in wait to shock you, which it apparently can't do all that well, like getting static shocked, but on the other hand it can keep it up unlike your carpet. Put a dab of hotglue there, slide a bit of heatshrink tubing onto it, and heat shrink it on... (Without the hot glue, the heatshrink tubing will just pull off.) Maybe clamp the end of the heatshrink tubing flat with your needlenose pliers while it's still hot, just to make dead sure no water can get in there.
Bang! Done!
Ok, so you want to have an EL wire that is red for a bit, then green, then blue... You'll be soldering these in serially. Same deal, with making the copper terminal and the stripped core terminal; then you lay the stripped core terminal of one wire onto the copper terminal of the other and vice-versa, and solder them together. So very easy.
Ok, so you want to make an EL feather duster, or maybe just split the wire into a Y for your flux capacitor. You need parallel soldering. Make the core wire part that's sticking out longer, like several cm, it's not like you can't trim it later if it's too long, but you need to be able to twist the core wires of every EL wire you're using here together. Make copper terminals for every wire as normal, and then solder the copper terminals to each other... Perhaps in groups of two, then bundled from there. If there are a ton of EL wires involved, maybe wrap the whole copper terminal with another strip of copper and solder that; the idea is to have that terminal all be connected. For the core terminal, twist the stripped part of the core wires together in a sort of rope, and solder it. Make a hook of the rope, and hook that to the other wire, and solder normally. This is maybe where you start needing electrical tape, to cover the wad of wires here.
And that is everything you need to know for off the shelf EL wire making stuff.
Attaching the EL wire to stuff is pretty obvious. Vinyl tape they suggested for smooth things. Running it through the holes in suction cups (sold in the hardware store with hooks in those holes). Running it through bits of straws that you have safety-pinned onto your clothes. To stick it to your body, latex body paint to stick to you and cotton threads in the paint to catch/stick to the wire, which otherwise pops right off the paint. Use clear bits of heatshrink tubing to attach the EL wire to stronger wire in arty shapes.
Attach the driver to hard stuff with velcro, maybe; or sling it in elastic bandage and safety-pin it to yourself.
Dress up the wire: make it look like a series of dots by spiraling 1/4" spiral wrap down it, the stuff sold to wrap your wires behind your computer into nice bundles. Cover it with mesh wire sheathing (like a finely-woven chinese finger trap) to make it look shaded, or bunch the mesh wire sheathing to have a fading in and out look instead of straight-up dots.
Seriously, this is not the sort of thing you need to take a class for. :)
So, EL wire has a solid wire core, about the gauge of a heavy-duty twisty tie, perhaps twice that of a normal twisty tie. This core wire is covered by phosphorescent caked-on powder that is insulating. Spiraled around the outside of the powder coating are two hair-fine wires, finer than the wires you'll find in individual Christmas lightbulbs, almost hard to see. That's all you really need for an EL wire. That contraption is encased in a vinyl sheath, which is as narrow as EL wire gets; at that gauge it's called "angel wire". The standard size EL wire is the next step up from that: the angelwire sheath encased in another vinyl sheath that makes the whole thing about 3 mm wide. Next up from that is "Fat" EL wire, which I assume is just another sheath thicker, and then "Ultra Fat" wire for another sheath past that. The UltraFat is, from what I remember, a titch more than a quarter-inch wide. The actual light production does not change; the only point of wider wire is to make the light appear "wider" at close range, and to have extra UV protection for the wire.
Oh hey, I have the catalog of the teachers here. It says that the diameters are 1.2 mm for angel wire, 2.3 mm for standard wire, 3.2 mm for "phatt" wire. There's also high brightness EL wire, which is in fact brighter than the normal stuff, because it has more phosphor powder on it, so it's wider as well: standard is 2.5 mm, and phatt is 5.0 mm.
There are two colors that EL wire glows: aqua, and white. All other colors are made by skinning the wire with different colored vinyl sheaths. The white, when unlit, looks pink.
All you need to make an EL wire glow is to run power from the core wire through the phosphorescent coating to the hairfine outer wires. The wire glows brightest at 2000 Hz: any more Hz than that just burn it out faster without making it brighter... Not that it's going to burn out anyway, since they last 2000 hours, and who has it lit that long? Running it at lower Hz, like the 60 that comes from the American wall, makes it very dim. It was incredibly noisy in the classroom, but the guy might have said that EL wire likes 103 volts best.
Anyway, the simplest way to fiddle around with this stuff involves soldering the EL wire to a premade connector, which links to a premade connector on the driver, the driver being the black box that contains a transformer to either make the DC power from batteries into AC power at high Hz, or make the low Hz stuff from a wall into high Hz stuff. It's trivial to buy drivers that also have built-in battery-holding places and switches for on, off, and perhaps blink. The drivers may have other electronic doodads inside... They didn't go into enough detail there to suit me, and I haven't yet broken open the one they gave us. But right, so soldering the EL wire to the connector means you can disconnect it to swap it out, or to sew it onto things or whatever. The connector is roughly the size and shape of a modern American telephone jack. The ones we had had about 5" of wire, but I believe there's also the option of soldering a whole lot of normal wire in there in case you want your battery pack 30 feet from the stuff that lights up. Any wire will do, so long as there are two wires isolated from each other.
The drivers are rated for the length of EL wire they can light; any length of wire leading to that EL wire is basically free, or at least one of the instructors had used the aforementioned 30' with no visible change in EL intensity. The EL wire can be of any gauge since they're all in fact the same mechanically, and the EL wire can be all in a line, or parallel in some sort of wacky EL featherduster.
What you need:
-a soldering iron
--which maybe has a place for a damp sponge
--also maybe a dish with brass-looking metal wool in it
---these are for cleaning solder globs off the hot tip. I was fine with just wiping it on the sponge to get everything off. Doesn't seem to affect the heat of the tip in any major way.
---the soldering iron had a pointy tip like a pencil, but one with a chisel-looking tip like for stained glass would probably work fine also
---the ones we were using had their own spring-looking sheath rests for when you're not using it
---apparently it was a 30-70 watt iron
-solder: 60/40 rosin core
--the rosin is the "flux", a necessary part of soldering, I don't know why, but straight-up melting metal doesn't work without perhaps the flux to float it along to the right places? Anyway, there is also acid-core solder, which is for plumbing, since the acid will keep eating away at electronics, but apparently for plumbing you can wash it off. Anyway, rosin core stuff smells heavenly, so that's really nice. Probably the 60/40 refers to lead/tin; I hear non-leaded solder is crap and brittle. However, the lead part is probably why you are supposed to solder in a ventilated area, so as to breathe as little fuming lead as possible. But pssh, we're talking less than an inch of solder necessary to make six connections.
-wire cutters
-wire strippers, maybe
-1 pair of needlenose pliers
-a blade, perhaps in one of those small pen-weight holders
-"helping hands" / "third hand" = at least 2 alligator clamps on sticks sticking up, where you can clip things while you have solder in one hand and an iron in the other
-scissors
-copper tape
-heat-shrink tubing in various widths, like 3/16", 1/8", 3/32"; it comes in many colors and clear. Or I guess you could use electrical tape, but that seems less tidy.
-a hairdryer or fancy heatshrinker blower thing that seems like the same idea but smaller and more tech-looking
-a glue gun
-hot glue sticks for the glue gun
-EL wire
-lightwire side snap release connector
-driver side snap release connector, hooked to a driver one hopes
-batteries for the driver
So, you score the vinyl sheath of the EL wire with the wire stripper, about 1.5 cm from the end, and you tug the vinyl sheath off, exposing the guts of the wire. Or at least, that's how I did it; score by twisting around outside of sheath, reach into score with fingernails, pull sheath off. I know some people do the score and pull with the same implement, but I couldn't get that to work.
With any skill both hairfine wires are still there; one is all you need, though. You cut a bit of the copper tape that's about 1/2 inch by 4 mm, and peel off the paper backing, and stick one end of the tape to the vinyl sheath of the EL wire right by the cut. You fold the hairfine wires down over the copper and solder them there.
About soldering: seriously, this is massively simple. In your left hand you have the flux-cored wire of solder pointing at your thing; in your right hand you have a hot soldering iron. The tip of the soldering iron is smooth and crap free. You touch the soldering iron to the metal thing, heating the thing up a tiny bit, and you bring the solder down to that area. The solder melts pretty much instantaneously, and I believe it flows towards the heat... Probably a wicking thing from the flux evaporating in an aromatic puff? Anyway, you can use the iron to smooth the solder around a bit since it's all liquid. If the wire of solder solidifies stuck onto the metal thing, a touch of the iron frees it. The idea is to flow the solder in a small smooth area, without pointy bits. It solidifies almost as quick as it melts, and it is ok to touch quicker than candle wax, like less than 30 seconds I believe.
Anyway, so then you curl the rest of the copper tape around the circumference of the EL wire, hopefully making a 4mm more than 360 degree band of copper at the end of the vinyl. You fold the hairfine wires back up and solder them again, just to make the connection even stronger. Ideally, hairfine wires will not be hanging out into space; clip 'em off.
You have a core wire to deal with now. Use the blade to scrape the phosphor off the end, like about a quarter inch scraped off all around the wire, since remember it will block the flow of electricity otherwise. Use the needlenose pliers to make a hook.
Does your lightwire side snap connector have wires of slightly different lengths? If not, make it so, and strip about a quarter inch of insulation off both ends. One wire should be about 1.5 cm longer than the other wire. See, the short wire will connect to the core wire, and the long wire will connect to the copper band/hairfine wires, and the connection will not short out because the snap connector wires will still have their insulation and the core wire has most of its insulating phosphor.
Put a hook in the short wire of the connector, too, and hook it to the core wire of the EL wire. Draw this out between the two alligator clamps of the helping hand, and maybe pinch the mechanical connection you've made here closed to make it even stronger yet. Then solder it.
Then connect the longer wire of the connector to the copper band: put some solder on them both, poke them together, and add more solder, keeping the wires together for the seconds until it sets. Clip off or melt off any pointy bits that might poke through the insulating heatshrink tubing you'll be adding once you've checked it.
Plug it in to see if it works.
Cut a bit of heatshrink tubing that will cover the whole area with about 4 mm on each side extra, slide it onto the wire, and use heat to shrink it on. Perhaps to make this even more rugged, you could put a dab of hot glue in the area before sliding on the heatshrink tubing, and then the heat that shrinks the tubing will also remelt the hot glue around everything.
The other end of the EL wire is lying in wait to shock you, which it apparently can't do all that well, like getting static shocked, but on the other hand it can keep it up unlike your carpet. Put a dab of hotglue there, slide a bit of heatshrink tubing onto it, and heat shrink it on... (Without the hot glue, the heatshrink tubing will just pull off.) Maybe clamp the end of the heatshrink tubing flat with your needlenose pliers while it's still hot, just to make dead sure no water can get in there.
Bang! Done!
Ok, so you want to have an EL wire that is red for a bit, then green, then blue... You'll be soldering these in serially. Same deal, with making the copper terminal and the stripped core terminal; then you lay the stripped core terminal of one wire onto the copper terminal of the other and vice-versa, and solder them together. So very easy.
Ok, so you want to make an EL feather duster, or maybe just split the wire into a Y for your flux capacitor. You need parallel soldering. Make the core wire part that's sticking out longer, like several cm, it's not like you can't trim it later if it's too long, but you need to be able to twist the core wires of every EL wire you're using here together. Make copper terminals for every wire as normal, and then solder the copper terminals to each other... Perhaps in groups of two, then bundled from there. If there are a ton of EL wires involved, maybe wrap the whole copper terminal with another strip of copper and solder that; the idea is to have that terminal all be connected. For the core terminal, twist the stripped part of the core wires together in a sort of rope, and solder it. Make a hook of the rope, and hook that to the other wire, and solder normally. This is maybe where you start needing electrical tape, to cover the wad of wires here.
And that is everything you need to know for off the shelf EL wire making stuff.
Attaching the EL wire to stuff is pretty obvious. Vinyl tape they suggested for smooth things. Running it through the holes in suction cups (sold in the hardware store with hooks in those holes). Running it through bits of straws that you have safety-pinned onto your clothes. To stick it to your body, latex body paint to stick to you and cotton threads in the paint to catch/stick to the wire, which otherwise pops right off the paint. Use clear bits of heatshrink tubing to attach the EL wire to stronger wire in arty shapes.
Attach the driver to hard stuff with velcro, maybe; or sling it in elastic bandage and safety-pin it to yourself.
Dress up the wire: make it look like a series of dots by spiraling 1/4" spiral wrap down it, the stuff sold to wrap your wires behind your computer into nice bundles. Cover it with mesh wire sheathing (like a finely-woven chinese finger trap) to make it look shaded, or bunch the mesh wire sheathing to have a fading in and out look instead of straight-up dots.
Seriously, this is not the sort of thing you need to take a class for. :)
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