I have to speak a bit for the original poster here....He did give us a rather detailed report of his machine and spent considerable energy and time describing it. (3000 % more info provided than the typical post of "I plug it in and it failed - what is wrong?").

I can feel for this person....because they have said that the machine runs with no wire going through it. It can be really frustrating to work for weeks, maybe even months, on a machine like this and then start up up to do the first wires only to have it fall flat. (Particularly if the boss came to see the first demonstration).

From my perspective it is clear that the people working on this project are not complete neophytes and as such the "system not reliable" frustration can be particularly painful. I'll be first to admit that I have been in this very same position more than once in my career. At those times of frustration, particularly when the burden of solving the problem actually falls on the shoulders of the engineers at the site doing the work, it can be VERY USEFUL to have a core dump of various ideas thrown out at you.....did you read this, did you check that, did you measure this, did you allow for such and such.

There is a rather small possibility that the "experts" here are actually going to be able to specifically solve the problem in the original poster's wire cutting and stripping machine. But the value of having ideas thrown out and bantered around can be enormous, particularly for an engineer that has the capability to sort out the suggestions and see if any of them make sense and have any applicability to the problem at hand.

Many of the toughest problems I have ever had to overcome were solved through suggestions made by people that by normal "professional etiquette" standards should have kept their mouths shut based on the premise of "what do they know about my complicated system".

Michael Karas