6502.org

Any of you guys using a wire wrap gun for your 6502 projects?

I have the manual hand tool which is great. However, I'm wondering if using a gun (electric or manual) is worth it? Are they any faster or do they just get in the way?

I assume if you had a monster project to wire (like some PDP based computers!) then a gun would be mandatory. But my projects are 6-15 chips or so.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Back in those days I use a battery driven WW-Gun (from - I am not sure - OK-Tools?). It was simple and worthy I think but not comparable to those professional ones that could cut, strip, and wrap altogether. Compared to (my) handwounded wraps the results were much more consistent. And it was faster of course. Later I added a switch to reverse the motor so I could use the gun to unwrap.

I had a friend 30 years ago who had an electric one but preferred the WSU 30-M that I show on my page answering WW questions and doubts. I don't know what model he had. I could see if I can still get hold of him and ask. I did these with the manual WSU 30-M tool. The orange and purple wires are unplated copper, whereas the others are silver-plated Kynar brand. Note that on the latter, the silver plating on the wire is tarnished; but the gas-tight chemical welds, where the clean corners of the posts bite into the clean wire, make for a perfectly reliable connection, indefinitely.

There are no gaps, and the only overwrapping is intentional where the insulated part goes over a lower layer's bare wire (and if a turn or two of the last layer's bare wire goes over the previous layer, I'll leave it if there are still plenty of turns on the post to get a good connection).

I used to use one - 30+ years ago and when I came to doing the prototypes for my current project I looked again... and was shocked at the cost, so started on breadboards and went to strip board....

-Gordon

I picked one up cheap on eBay and used it on my build. This was mainly because it was what I had used decades ago, in college courses; I hadn't used a manual tool and so the familiarity of the gun was reassuring as I was tackling an otherwise daunting job. Of course, I needed a manual tool for undoing connections as well anyway. I'm guessing that it saved me a little time, but not much in comparison to the time for cutting and stripping wires, carefully counting pins, and, of course, trickiest of all, actually inserting wires into the wire-wrap tool with middle-aged eyesight.

Cut strip and wrap was the way I used to build 'em back in the seventies; the nice thing about the powered guns was that the measurement of the connecting wire is automatic.

But these days, given the prevalence of cheap PCB manufacture (e.g. JLCPCB) and free tools like Kikad, I won't bother: use Kikad for both the schematic capture and pcb layout, send off the gerbers and wait a couple of weeks. Two major advantages: first that what you build is what you designed (assuming you use the in built checking) and the second that there's no difficulty in using surface mount components instead of through hole, if that's your thing.

Neil

How do powered guns automate measurement? I though all they do is twist the wire N turns very quickly... But you still have to measure and strip by hand. Am I wrong?