they make a chemical stripper to strip off wire enamel. I know its sold at
Radio Shack (or used to be sold). DOn't know if an ace hardware would carry
it.

Transformers can get really hot in their cores. I have never seen one that
used burnable enamal.
The burnable stuff is usually used for small inductors that get dipped into
a solder pot. THe solder is hot enough to burn right thru the enamal and
they don;t have to have an extra process step to remove it.

"# Fred #" wrote in message
news

"mm" wrote in message
...
AIUI, when soldering to an enameled wire, there is no need to remove
the enamel first. It just burns up and disappears when one is
applying the solder. Is that true?

No, if you could burn the enamel off you still have residue on the wire.
Do you want to solder dirty wires? Use sandpaper or fine steel wool down
to shiny clean copper - works for me.


Otherwise, are there any tricks to repairing a small transformer**
such as used to power an audio device such as a clock radio from
110VAC: I take the cover off and the first layer of "tape" and if
there is only a half inch of wire going to the priamary winding, and
if when I try to solder to it, it breaks off just as it goes into the
winding, under other stuff, I haven't been able to fix them in the
past. But maybe there is a trick I don't know.

A little tricky when the wire is small as its hard to solder (almost no
contact area with the iron tip) and a little pull could break it. But its
done all the time. Clean and tin the tip of the iron would help in heat
transfer. Another thing you could do if the wire is too short to work with
is pigtail in another larger gage wire - twist together and than you could
solder much easier, heat shrink and solder the other end of the pigtail to
the terminal.