The time I spent 3 days trying to untangle a spool of 12-gauge copper wire for a side gig

Back in 2018, I took a weird job sorting scrap wire for a recycling yard over in Portland. I grabbed a spool that looked simple, but it had 200 feet of wire tangled into a bird's nest mess. Took me 72 hours with a pair of pliers and a lot of swearing to get it straight. Has anyone else dealt with wire that seems cursed from the factory?

3 comments

3 Comments

nguyen.angela21d ago

Man that is a WILD amount of time for one spool. I gotta give you props for sticking with it. @gavin469 makes a good point about how the damage usually happens on the outer rings or flanges, but I've actually seen wire get those deep random kinks from a machine mis-threading it. At a job site I worked on, a buddy had a spool that got fed wrong and it pulled loops into the middle layers, looked exactly like a bird's nest. Factory drops don't usually create that kind of tight, tangled chaos deep inside.

grant47821d ago

I'm pretty sure 12-gauge wire is copper. You said 12-gauge copper wire, but that's kind of redundant. Anyway, that spool probably got dropped or mishandled at the factory. I've seen it happen with pallets of wire.

gavin46921d ago

Kind of redundant" - okay but not everyone knows that though, some folks think of wire gauge as just size and don't realize it's almost always copper for that size. Anyway, about your factory drop theory, have you actually seen a spool get damaged that exact way? I'm asking because I've unloaded plenty of pallets and the outer rings usually get crushed or the flanges crack, not the wire itself getting all those random sharp kinks deep in the spool. That looks more like something snagged it while it was spinning fast on a machine, like it got pulled through something wrong. Did the coils on the ones you saw look this messed up or was it more of a visible crush damage thing?