Jumpers

Next up was to wire up the jump leads from the edges of the board. These will eventually connect to the tube sockets, input jacks, speaker, etc.

The kit came with cloth covered wire for these jumpers, and as I cut the first piece to the right length I also tried to strip the end so I had some clean wire to solder. The cloth covering wasn't the most forgiving sheath to cut through, and I had little success in getting a nicely stripped end.

I looked on the RadioShack website for a wire stripper tool, and found one that looked reasonable. I planned to buy it the next day.

For some reason I decided to Google for tips on stripping cloth covered wire. I'm glad I did, because it turns out that you don't need to strip it at all! You just pull back the covering to expose the wire underneath. Easy!

I worked through each jumper connection, and the couple of under-board connections. This didn't take too long, but I found that I needed to refer back to the big circuit diagram that came with the kit to make sure that I was putting things in the right place.