Two things about connectors in general


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Posted by Sherman in Idaho [108.162.245.7] on Thursday, December 15, 2016 at 13:11:21 :

In Reply to: Re: Firewall Bulkhead Fitting for Electric, Yes or No? posted by Kaegi [108.162.246.44] on Wednesday, December 14, 2016 at 20:18:02 :

They are convenient for maintenance and they are inherent points of failure. In a typical connector, you introduce three contact-based (non-soldered) points of failure -- a crimp on the pin, a crimp on the socket, and the contact between pin and socket. On high-current connectors, a bad contact, whether due to workmanship or corrosion/vibration, leads overheating, which causes accelerated failure of that pin and maybe others near it. High-current contacts are susceptible to overheating, and low-current "signal" contacts (like instrument sender wires) are susceptible to bad connections due to corrosion.

The Bendix/Amphenol circular connectors used on M.V. wiring harnesses mitigate the dangers by having the wires soldered in to both pins and sockets, the contacts themselves are silver-plated (much better for high currents) and the assembly is gasketed and sealed to keep water and dirt out. They are also very expensive and a hassle to assemble. Short of that, there are good modern plastic "civilian" connectors, but there are also a lot of bad ones that tend to cause no end of frustrating trouble after a while (I'm thinking of our "new" Mine Tour trolley, in particular).

If I was doing what you're doing -- completely rewiring and modernizing an old vehicle -- I would select a top-quality connector series available in a wide range of formats (pin count, current capacity, bulkhead and cable mount, etc), that had been around for quite a while and was likely to remain widely available for the foreseeable future, and use that series everywhere on the vehicle.



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