I'm disproportionately pleased with myself this morning. For many years I've had a very long string of small LED lights which get strung round and inside the "mushroom tree" (weeping birch) and along the fencing to either side of it in my front garden at Christmas time. It's a very long piece of kit and really quite a handful to deal with. When I was dismantling it last New Year I got a bit tied up and disoriented stripping it out of the tree and lost my balance. This caused me to stagger forward and I broke one of the wires. I was very annoyed with myself as about a third of the lights were dead as a result.
Anyway, I bundled them up and put them in the big box where I keep all the electrical Christmas stuff intending to solder the wires back together when I'd time. Probably a month or so later I got the soldering Iron out and set about it. But, damn it, the solder wouldn't "take" to the wire. Looking closely at the wire, although it is copper coloured, I don't think it's actually copper. I took a hobby knife to it and scraped the wire and, right enough, it's a lacquer! When scraped away the wire looks like steel? I was using multicore solder but also have some aggressive solder past so tried some of that. But, no good, the solder still wouldn't "wet" the wire. So I gave up again.
This morning I thought. "Ok, I've got some small bore copper tube. Lets try pushing a length of this tube over one end of the wire (like you would with heat shrink) then clean the ends of both wires, twist them together, pull the tubing over the joint and flood the whole thing inside with solder? Even if the solder doesn't "wet" the wire the fact it's twisted together and now entombed in a flood of solder inside the little bit of tube, Surely current will flow? And, Hurrah, it does. The lights are all working just fine again. Luckily I'd pushed a length of heat shrink onto the wire before I started so I was able to enclose the whole repair in heat shrink and, hopefully, that'll make it water tight for next Christmas's display. I have icicle lights along the front of the house attached to the garage and porch roof and more stuff in the living room window too, so there is a lot going on out front of our house at that time of year. It's put a big smile on my face and allowed me to forget we're going for our anti viral Jags this afternoon.