My Dad gave me his vintage Stripmaster a few years back. It has to be at least 50 years old (if not older) so it's got a lot of mileage on it. It's pretty filthy. It's been sitting in my tool box for a while but I rarely ever use it since I always feel like I have to wash my hands after using it. I was stripping a ton of wires yesterday while working on assembling the display for my new clock. My usual wire strippers are OK for just a few wires, but with the amount of wire that I needed to strip I thought it would be faster to whip out the Stripmaster because it automatically pulls off the insulation with zero effort. It's so much quicker.





This thing is filthy. You can hardy even make out the writing on the handle.



After I finished the clock display, I decided to finally take this thing apart and give it a good cleaning. I'm not going for 100% restoration because that would take way more time than I want to spend on it. There's a lot of parts to this thing. I'm not sure I want to take the jaws apart. It looks like more trouble than it's worth.



I only want to take it apart just enough so that I can give the pieces a good scrubbing and a buffing with some steel wool. I basically just removed the center screw and pulled out the pin in the middle that secured both halves together.



I then scrubbed the whole thing with an old toothbrush to knock out all the garbage that was in there. What a mess.



I then took it to the sink and scrubbed all the parts in hot water. I then gave them a good buffing with some steel wool.



I then put the whole thing back together. What a difference! It's like night and day.





Despite not taking the jaws apart it was pretty easy to get into all the nooks and crannies with some steel wool.





I think I'll definitely be using this more now that it's nice and clean.