DIY wire-wrapping tool

Wire-wrapping is a very handy way to connect wires to PCB pins, especially in two scenarios:

  1. As an alternative to soldering, in order to be able to easily recycle the components.
  2. As an alternative to female jumper wires, in order to save some vertical space (sometimes jumper wire connectors are just too long).

A DIY wire-wrapping tool can be built from an empty ball point pen ink cartridge or from lollipop sticks, and even out of cotton swabs.

Tools made this way will work fine with solid core wires between 30 and 24 AWG like for instance those used in CAT5 cables.

Here's mine, made with a metallic pen cartridge. Last picture is an actual example of use.

metallic pen cartridge
hole in the cartridge
wire wrapping tool
wire setup
wrapping the wire
wire wrapped
wire wrapped on a trinket

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Can be used as an improvised

Anonymous_Tron's picture

Can be used as an improvised wire wrap tool, but it is a highly unreliable connection!

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