Why does nobody talk about how useless those wire strippers are on old coaxial cable?

I was on a job last week in an older apartment complex built in the 90s and I had this pair of Klein wire strippers that I've been using for years. Went to strip the outer jacket off this RG6 and it just kept catching and ripping the braid underneath. I spent 20 minutes fighting with it before I gave up and used my utility knife. The guy I was working with, who's been doing this for 25 years, just laughed and said those strippers are garbage on anything older than 5 years because the jacket gets brittle. He showed me his simple trick of scoring it lightly with the knife and snapping it off clean. I honestly never thought about how the age of the cable affects the tools you use. Anybody else run into this problem where newer tools just don't work on older materials? What do you use for old coax that's been sitting in the wall forever?

2 comments

2 Comments

danielmason8d ago

yeah the jacket gets hard and weird after a while, almost like it shrinks. I had a spool of some old quad shield RG6 from like 2008 that I found in a basement and tried to use those self-adjusting strippers on it, just wrecked the shielding every time. What finally worked for me was actually one of those cheap blue handle strippers with the little blade that you rotate around, but I had to go slow and not squeeze too hard or it'd dig into the dielectric too. honestly for really old stuff I just do the knife trick like your buddy, score it, snap it, and peel the braid back separate. saves so much headache.

jennifer9658d ago

Oh come on, those cheap blue strippers are junk, they always chew up the cable worse than anything.