Good Copper Wires

You can't get any electronics project done without some sort of good proper wire, in particular, the kind that carries up to and is the kind that would be well suited for PCB work.

It has to be said that it is little known but wires actually do rot on the inside such that if you strip a cable that has not been used for a long time, you might be very surprised that the wires on the inside that have been stripped simply cannot be soldered anymore. The symptoms are very frustrating because you end up shooting up the solder temperature or adding too much flux and insisting because even though the metal has oxidized, you are sure that it should work and the solder joint can be made. However, to reduce costs, a lot of wires partially blend the "real metal", such as the typically expensive copper and these days, even the aluminum for aluminum wires, with some compound like brass or others that will simply not be able to be soldered. Bear in mind that if you ever get into a loophole that you can't seem to get out of, that your soldering skills might still be very good but that the wire you are using might have just rotted entirely and simply cannot be soldered anymore.

The market regarding wires is a thunder-dome of scams, pseudo-scams and outright lies. If you look at the cable illustrated previously, the color is absolutely perfect and it looks like this is some proper copper wire. Furthermore, it is advertised for wire that can be used for speakers leading the buyer to believe that it is indeed pure copper in order to have a good performance. However, if you look closely, the label says copper-clad which means that it only has a little copper on the inside but that the rest is some other compound that is not even able to carry any electricity. To be fair, this product was the worst that ever crossed our workbench. It was expensive compared to the baseline and it was not even rotted but simply refused to be soldered, at all! It went straight into the bin.

A good source of wires, if your electronics cross with computer engineering, are older Ethernet cables. An Ethernet cable has 6 inner wires, typically made of copper due to the standard having to be respected, the wires are easy to unbraid and typically per meter an Ethernet cable can sometimes be cheaper than wire that is advertised as copper (for instance, an older Ethernet cable will be much cheaper than the brand new, expensive and useless cable in the former illustration).

Maybe the only drawback is that the braided copper wires inside the Ethernet cable are actually a little more rigid than the usual wires used in electronics projects. However, interestingly, that sort of rigidity is something that can grow on you and can be actually more useful than having a less rigid copper wire.