I had a dishwasher repaired. The tech wanted to check the connections to the house wiring. The dishwasher leads were soldered from the factory (not sure if you call it soldered or tinned... probably tinned).

He very quickly and haphazardly remade the connections and for piece of mind I redid them after he left.

I found it suprising the leads weren't stranded. In this case, I used a yellow wire nut but didn't pretwist as they were tinned...

is it typical to have an appliance have tinned leads from the factory?

The tips of the wire were hard, like if you were to solder a piece of stranded wire. You could not spread out the strands in other words.

Does it sound like a heated connection fused/soldered the tinned copper tops or are the hard soldered like that from the factory? (So much that I didn't want to pretwist the connection, I just put them side by side when twisting my wire nut)

 

The wires were probably tinned. It doesn't really matter if they are or not from a code point of view. Soldering is allowed, but there must also be a mechanical connector (screw, wirenut, etc); therefore soldering of any type is essentially optional.

 

Probably tinned. No need to spread out the strands to make the splice.

 

What I am getting at is that the stranded wire is now solid after the factory tinned them. However, I did not pretwist the connection like I would normally do a solid/solid connection because I feared breaking the tinned strands.

So is there a proper way to make up that type of connection?
Is laying the two side by side and simply applying a wirenut the proper method?
Should I have just snipped the tinned end off and re-stripped the wire?

 

Laying the two side by side and applying a wire nut is fine.

 

As the Boss said directly above, yes.
In my opinion, having the tinned wires is better than connecting the strands to solid.
Either will work, but it's a little trickier connecting a stranded wire to solid than some may think.

If you're not careful connecting stranded to solid, the stranded could be "pulled up" too far into wire nut while tightening.