Learned something: sealed solder connectors

DonM

I had to change some wiring on my golf cart today to accommodate a new, improved battery charger. I needed to use a 10 gauge ring terminal so I bought a two pack. When I crimped one onto the wire, it broke. Hmmm, it’s soft and brittle. Hmmm, what does this mean on the package, “sealed solder?”

I’m glad I had a second one, haha. You heat the terminal, the plastic does the heat shrink thing, and then the solder inside melts into the wire joint. Neat!

Rickochet

DonM

Good info, thanks for sharing. I installed a new battery charger for the 4 batteries on my houseboat a few years ago and had to extend all of the leads to the batteries. I used some crimp terminals to butt splice them and they had built in water proof heat shrink on them. I just crimped them and hit them with the heat gun and job done. What kind of heat gun did you use?

Par4QC

DonM Ha, and all those years ago women thought Shake 'N' Bake was something!!

darpar

DonM

Those are called "solder sleeves", we used those all the time when I worked at Boeing wiring up planes.
Some also had a pigtail wire coming from the sleeve so you could ground a shielded Kapton wire to
protect against lightening strikes, static etc.
We used "Zap Guns"/IR guns to melt the solder in seconds.

DonM

Rickochet I used a propane torch turned way down.

KCee

I used those to fix the door switch on my old car several years ago and they worked great. One of our engineers had gotten a bunch of free samples at work and I borrowed a couple.

Spartan

I'd never heard of that. I'll have to try and remember that.

DonM

I got em at NAPA. I don't know if you'd find them in the big box home centers. Maybe.

johnnydoom

I learned about those solder sleeves from a guy at work back in the 90’s. He would call them zap splices.