Manual Wire Wrap
A manual wire wrap tool resembles a small pen. It is convenient for minor repairs. Wire wrap is one of the most repairable systems for assembling electronics. Posts can be rewrapped up to ten times without appreciable wear, provided that new wire is used each time. Slightly larger jobs are done with a manual "wire wrap gun" having a geared and spring-loaded squeeze grip to spin the bit rapidly.
Such tools were used in large numbers in American telephone exchanges in the last third of the 20th century, usually with a bigger bit to handle 22 or 24 AWG wire rather than the smaller 28 or 30 AWG used in circuit boards and backplanes. The larger posts can be rewrapped hundreds of times. They persisted into the 21st century in distribution frames where insulation-displacement connectors had not taken over entirely. Larger, hand held, high speed electric wrap guns replaced soldering in the late 1960s for permanent wiring, when installing exchange equipment. In the middle 1980s they were gradually replaced by connectorized cables.
The Apollo Guidance Computer with its short production run and stringent reliability requirement was one of the early applications of wire wrap to computer assembly.
Read more about this topic: Wire Wrap
Famous quotes containing the words manual, wire and/or wrap:
“In spite of our worries to the contrary, children are still being born with the innate ability to learn spontaneously, and neither they nor their parents need the sixteen-page instructional manual that came with a rattle ordered for our baby boy!”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)
“A new idea is rarely born like Venus attended by graces
More commonly it’s modeled of baling wire and acne.
More commonly it wheezes and tips over.”
—Marge Piercy (b. 1936)
“The first duty of a lecturer—to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantlepiece for ever.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)