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Comment by phito | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if that's what you meant, but there are small heat shrink plastic sleeves with low melting point solder in the middle. You can heat it with a heat gun and the solder will melt, joining the two wire together. They're often used to fix lawnmower robot perimeter cables. I find them very useful, reliable, waterproof and they are barely wider than the wire itself.

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I recently used those to repair a friends scooter (a cheap knock off of the Xiamomi M365). Water ingress through the charge port seems like a foregone conclusion and it shorted some wires running from the motor controller to the dashboard PCB, frying both. I swapped out all the JST connectors for marine grade solder sleeves. It's less "repairable" now, but hopefully a lot less likely to need repair in the first place.

Yeah, that's what I meant, but I don't think they work well if you have to solder more then a few parallel wires because then it gets really bulky. Not really good for production work, imho.

Techniques like these are typically for in-situ repair.

I've tried to make a thinner splice on a four-wire cable, by staggering the joints. But I found it was too difficult to cut, strip, pre-load heat shrink, twist wires, and solder without melting the adjacent heat shrink. I think it's doable if you really need it, but I was just experimenting, so I gave up on it.

The NASA Workmanship's guide linked in a sibling instructs to stagger multiple splices. I think that would help with this problem.

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