The USB gooseneck extension consists of a spring-steel helix with an aluminum filler strip to smooth the outside:
USB Gooseneck – filler unwound
A pin vise holds the intact part of the gooseneck.
The filler unwinds easily, but the spring required several bashes with a drift punch to loosen the first coil. The pin vise can’t apply enough grip to immobilize the spring, so you (well, I) bashed more-or-less radially outward, rather than at a tangent; that’s almost as difficult to do as to describe.
After enough bashing to get a grip with sturdy needlenose pliers, the spring unwound in short sections, again applying force radially to avoid turning the gooseneck in the pin vise:
USB Gooseneck – spring unwinding
The black helix aimed off to the side seems to be plastic from the USB shell injection-molded around the connector hardware.
Chopping the spring with the tip of a hardened diagonal cutter (don’t do this with a copper-wire dike!) and bashing the tail ends back around the wire core produced a passable result:
USB Gooseneck – reshaped ends
The black thing sticking out beyond the spring seems to be the jacket around the wires.
All the conductors are the same diameter, which isn’t shouldn’t be particularly surprising.
