Heavy 4-8-2 questions RE: wires and running DCC

[bnoem1]

Pulled out a Heavy Mountain that I'd gotten a while ago and began to run it.  I was running great, but with occasional stuttering and stalling.  I did what any of us would to and took the tender apart as the first steps in checking for problems.  First thing I noticed was  that all of the wires running from the loco to the tender had a lot of the insulation paint gone the copper wires were bare.  I also noticed this in the tender with the decoder wires.  My question is should these wires be insulated?  What with; paint or liquid tape?  Could this be responsible for the stutter or stall? Thanks in advance.

[spookshow]

I always thought that copper color was just some sort of coating on the outside of the insulation (or perhaps the insulation itself is clear). Then there's a layer of black paint on top of that.

The paint layer comes off really easily, which would make for a total disaster if that's all that's covering up the actual copper insides of the wire.

-Mark

[plas man]

the varnish type insulation on the copper wire may have worn off and shorted together , it happened to my Bachmann N&W 4-8-4 J class and fried the de-coder , after I painted the wires black and new de-coder it has been ok  , one day it will/may get re-wired ( )