In sci.electronics.repair micky wrote:

It pays to save electronics scrap. I needed a short piece of thin but
not too thin single strand wire and I don't seem to have any except for
a collection of 8 wires soldered into an octal plug from a 1930's (or
40's or 50's?) radio. (the kind of plug that uses a tube socket)

IIRC, I got this 40 years ago and I think I got it from someone else's
scrap, so it's easily 60 years old. The red, blue, and brown wires are
quite pretty but the yellow? wires seem very dirty. I wonder why.

It's actually not single strand but the entire length of the
multi-strand is tinned.

Does that mean they used solder on 100's of thousands of miles of wire
when only a teeny tiny bit ever appeared out of the insulation? Isn't
that a big waste of tin and lead? Do they still do that?

I've seen this wire- it looked like the standard cloth covered wire in a
old TV or radio set, but was completely solderered, not just tinned. Not
sure what the reason for this was either.

Another interesting factoid: I needed to use for the first time some
liquid rosin flux (in a little bottle from MG Chemicals). I've had it
for 10 years unopened and it has one of those obnoxious caps that you
have to press down before turning. No matter how hard I pressed down,
it eventually ratcheted over what it was supposed to catch on. I tried
over and over, last night. This morning it opened on the second try!
The room temperature is about the same.

How does flux go "bad"? I use the liquid type in what looks like a paint
marker and it still works fine, way past the "use by" date.