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G'day all,
Short story: I need to separate an inner wire from an outer wire on a laptop charger that goes into a 120/240V socket, but is stepped down to 12V DC. Is electrical tape gonna cut it?
Long story:
Recently I ran over a charger cable with a chair and it managed to slice through the insulation with enough force to make the wires touch and the thing cut out. Worried I'd caused some irreparable damage I yanked the socket from the wall and inspected the cable. It has an inner bunch of wires with a layer of plastic insulation then an outer layer of wires spiraling around that, with the outer insulation around that. So my chair managed to slice the outer insulation, move the outer wires a bit and then slice the inner insulation so the inner wires and outer wires touched.
I pulled back the outer insulation to inspect it and managed to separate out the wires and then very carefully plugged it back in and it works... but obviously, even by my low safety standards, exposed live wires aren't a great thing to have lying around! It is downstream of the transformer/rectifier, so it's not 120V going through it, only 12V, but still it's not a good situation.
My plan was to wrap the inner wire with electrical tape to mend the slashes in the insulation, then rewrap the outer wires around them and either use a length of heatshrink or more electrical tape to cover that up. Would that be sufficient or is the very thought of it making you have a heart attack thinking I'm about to burn down my house?
Short story: I need to separate an inner wire from an outer wire on a laptop charger that goes into a 120/240V socket, but is stepped down to 12V DC. Is electrical tape gonna cut it?
Long story:
Recently I ran over a charger cable with a chair and it managed to slice through the insulation with enough force to make the wires touch and the thing cut out. Worried I'd caused some irreparable damage I yanked the socket from the wall and inspected the cable. It has an inner bunch of wires with a layer of plastic insulation then an outer layer of wires spiraling around that, with the outer insulation around that. So my chair managed to slice the outer insulation, move the outer wires a bit and then slice the inner insulation so the inner wires and outer wires touched.
I pulled back the outer insulation to inspect it and managed to separate out the wires and then very carefully plugged it back in and it works... but obviously, even by my low safety standards, exposed live wires aren't a great thing to have lying around! It is downstream of the transformer/rectifier, so it's not 120V going through it, only 12V, but still it's not a good situation.
My plan was to wrap the inner wire with electrical tape to mend the slashes in the insulation, then rewrap the outer wires around them and either use a length of heatshrink or more electrical tape to cover that up. Would that be sufficient or is the very thought of it making you have a heart attack thinking I'm about to burn down my house?