Blackcap Blog

Published at 13:35 on 5 December 2024

Back in 2021, I evaluated different kinds of wire strippers and chose to upgrade my toolchest to contain some better ones. It was in retrospect a good decision that I do not regret.

But I had wondered about automatic strippers, and how well they work. Recently, I had a project that involved stripping a lot of wire, so I bought a set of Irwin No. 2078300 automatic self-adjusting wire strippers. I chose these because they were mid-range: I do not trust cheap Chinese knockoff tools and I do not strip enough wire to justify purchasing expensive German-made ones. Plus, I had heard that the design of the Irwins lent itself well to stripping the jacket off multi-conductor cables, and the latter is a fiddly task that would be nice to automate. (Klein makes a very similar set, but the Irwins were available locally and tend to have a slightly higher user rating.)

My verdict: I have tried them on a number of wires and cables, and their primary best use is to strip the outer jacket off multi-conductor cables.

For wires, it was a crapshoot how well they worked (or if they worked at all). In particularly, they do nothing but fail on Teflon or THHN insulation (but I knew that going in). On other wire types, sometimes they worked quite well, sometimes erratically. There is a tension adjustment one can fiddle with to tailor them for a particular wire type, but why bother? If I use my non-automatic Klein Kurve strippers, they always work precisely as intended, no fiddling with any adjustment necessary. Maybe if I needed to strip a lot of a given kind of wire at once it would be worth the time investment of getting the adjustment just right, but otherwise old-school strippers are a win.

Note: Most Romex these days tends to have THHN-insulated wire inside, so if residential wiring is your thing, these automatic strippers are likely to be a huge disappointment if you are expecting them to strip individual conductors.

For multi-conductor cables, it took the outer jacket off quite nicely, and it did so perfectly the first time, every time I tried it, on every type of cable I tried (Cat 5 cable, audio cable, low-voltage alarm and thermostat cable, round power cord cable, and Romex). No more fiddling with a knife and either not scoring the jacket deeply enough on the first try, scoring it too deeply and damaging the conductors inside, slipping up and cutting myself, etc. That justified their place in my toolbox, but if I had bought them expecting a general-purpose wire-stripping solution, I would have been disappointed.

So if you have wished for a tool to automatically de-jacket multi-conductor cable, buy these, but don’t expect them to be a general-purpose wire stripping solution.