Wire with strands 36 gauge and smaller is known as "fine stranded conductors" and it does come in Al, Cu clad Al, or copper. Those conductors look pretty thin to me so I assume this is in that class.

Special interconnects are required for fine-stranded conductors according to UL.
http://ul.com/global/documents/corp.../newsletters/electricalconnections/June11.pdf

 

Aluminum wire alloyed with iron and magnesium is currently being used in the automotive industry.
They use tin plated crimp connectors. The crimp breaks the oxide casing and the tin (under proper pressure) bonds with bare aluminum.
See pdf.

 

It's possible you are not engaging all the strands during test. If they are insulated from each other with resin or lacquer, how do you guarantee all the strands are electrically connected?

I set up the connections twice and got the same answer. After your comment I went back and soldered the ends as best as I could. No change.

 

You guys are going to love this. I flipped over the roll and there was a label. Guess what the sellers name is....

EXECUTION AUDIO.......It is speaker wire. Use enough of this wire and you will execute your amplifier. They have a website and it lists a 12 ga speaker cable but no data. This cable is slightly different from their pictured product.

 

R T F M ...

 

It's copper clad aluminum, 287 strands.

http://execution-audio.com/products/execution-audio-orange-black-12-gauge-speaker-wire

 

@KJ6EAD
Yup, I saw that. It tells me a lot , except it does not tell me that it is .0047 ohms per foot, per wire. (A little detail they decided to leave out.) If you want to buy some, I have a nice big roll of it.

 

I'm rather concerned that more of you guys are not familiar with the loads of copper clad aluminum alloy wire that is out there these days and BTW it's not a new thing from the Chinese either. Our ever so loving American manufacturers started sneaking it into industrial equipment back in the 70's and have been doing it ever since.

A buddy of mine has a big scrap yard that has been in their family for three generations now. One thing they have accumulated is piles of is old Miller, Lincoln and other major brands name welding machines along with huge electric motors and transformers built back in the 70's and 80's they now can't get rid of for the simple fact they have absolutely no positive value due to their having all copper clad aluminum windings and wire throughout.

The copper cladding is thick enough that the the wiring could be soldered together back in the day but being that thick it creates too much contamination in a typical aluminum smelting process to be worth trying to recover.
So due to that they have several semi loads of heavy junk metal that has no resale value whatsoever.

The heavy iron has some value but the mix of copper and aluminum makes shredding or smelting it directly not cost effective and the copper plating makes the aluminum worthless and the amount of copper that is there is not worth the efforts to recover that either by any normal means.

I and a number of others who do a bit of scraping on the side have been bit by that junk as well. Some years ago I picked up three 600 - 800 amp commercial Miller welders that I thought would be easy money being they were $100 or so each and by the looks they had a good 200+ pounds of copper windings each!

Nope. Turns out they had about 20 pounds of worthless copper clad aluminum in them and that was it. Three hours of labor to tear one down just to end up with about $3 worth of iron, a couple dollars of brass connectors and bolts and a pile of copper clad aluminum crap wire that I couldn't give a way.
The only things of any salvage value to me were the six big diodes, their heatsink plates, the cooling fan and the big three phase contactor of which all of them combined were not worth $100 to me.

To this day the two 600 amp units are still sitting up in my junk row with the bushes growing up around them.

 

I learned my lesson on this wire. The next garage sale, someone is getting a great deal on some crappy wire. I might even put it on Craigs list. (The car stereo people probably won't know the difference.)

 

I have a problem that I am getting no where with. I bought a 300 ft roll of super flexible 12 ga. wire. The strands looks like they are copper plated over some metal.

All of the attempts at soldering happens the same way; the wire heats up, the flux begins to boil, the wire starts taking solder, solder flows well for 3 to 5 seconds and then stops flowing. After that point the solder beads on top of the wire and falls off. I have tried four different kinds of flux and three kinds of solder.

Here is some pictures

Unsoldered wire

Rosin flux with 60/40 solder

Cflux

Stay-Sliv flux with 60/40

Electronic silver solder , flux that came with it.

Flux

In all of the above attempts, the wire took the solder for a few seconds and then like a switch, stopped taking solder.

I tried acid core solder but that was a disaster.

The only way I can use this wire is to crimp it into a lug.

Has anyone experienced this behavior and have any suggestions??

This looks like cable used at airplanes its an aluminium alloy and crimp socked only. ( lighter then copper wire)
If this is the case the misery is complete you need special sockets and a tool allowing extra high force.