Don’t try soldering the crimp-style D connector pins as you won’t be able to get an extract tool over the barrel if you ever need to remove one!
wigglyamp wrote:
need to remove one
Also known as the “which way was ‘left’?” moment :-)
One striking thing about “avionics versions” (i.e. crimp pins) of normal D connectors is the massive extra cost. You could spend €100 on the crimp pins for some of these, whereas the most expensive possible (heavy gold plated) solder bucket connector would be 1/5 of that. The old King connectors (Positronic, with some lookalikes having existed at various times) were inevitably pricey because there was no choice.
Accordingly, all the avionics installers I had ever met kept a big box of avionics connectors extracted from removed wiring and re-used them whenever possible. If you solder, you can re-use them many times.
Yeah, machined pins are around 1 dollar apiece unless you find an overstock sale. On the other hand, I’ve seen GA avionics with D-sub connectors filled with open-barrel pins:
Though obviously less dependable than machined ones, they are still very decent if crimped properly. The downside is that you need to inspect them much more carefully after crimping, and the tools must be in perfect working order.
Those would suffer horribly with corrosion.
I removed some very cheap connectors from my Robin during the re-build and replaced them with the much better connectors a that Robin now use but even these had the type of pins in the photo above.
The question is do I want to hang my life on a $ 0.01 pin or would I prefer the reliability of a gold plated crimp pin at $0.43 that assures repeatable high quality joints and corrosion resistance with the safety and reliability that this brings……………. for me the cost is justified by the reliability , others may decide to spin the chamber in a different way.
Regarding corrosion of these stamped pins, they also exist in gold-, silver- or nickel-plated versions. The B-shaped crimp itself, even if it looks flimsy, is actually fairly well thought out, and there’s an enormous amount of industry experience behind it. When I started to gather papers on crimping a couple of years ago, roughly half of them were dedicated to this B-crimp (a.k.a. F-crimp). According to the leading manufacturers, it is very reliable when done properly. It also provides basic strain relief because of the second crimp on the insulation.
