Crimp connections

MEXICOWANDERER wrote:
I'll add this as a tip

There are times when added strain relief is desired for -any- electrical termination.

Use 3-1 heat shrink tubing over the joint.

Then slip on a 2nd piece of tubing over the first shrunken tubing but make it a bit shorter in length.

If it took several hundred 90 degree flexes to fatigue soldered or bare wire, you'll spend thousands of flexes before you give up trying to break a doubled application of heat shrink tubing. It simply will not break. Unlined heat shrink tubing is almost worthless.

Worried about the inherent strength of the wire itself? Select -Cross Link- insulated wire. As a bonus Cross Link Wire withstands higher temperature. As a negative it is difficult to find tinned Cross Link wire. DLO wire is much tougher but available solely in black.

correct. In many cases the failure mode of a crimped or soldered connection, (most often soldered connection) is not paying attention to strain relief during flexure, not failure of the intended solder joint in the connector.

And travel trailers are inheritantly subject to lots of vibration.

I worked at a company that designed high end T&M equipment and to MIL spec's. One thing we found is that soldered joint quality, no matter how much training and skill is highly dependent on the operator. And the most common failure wasn't a solder failure, it was using to MUCH solder, causing solder wicking down the conductor. then at the end of the solder, was a high stress concentration during flexure. Regardless of what strain relief we did. We did extensive testing using crimped connectors with built in strain relief. reliability was much better than soldered wire connection. Now this was with small ga. wire, not #00 cable. We also used calibrated crimpers, dedicated to each specific connector and wire size, that were tested and calibrated periodically by the Metrology group. A good crimped connection is a gas tight seal.

And big box stores seldom have a acceptable quality crimper even for small ga wire.

I almost always use a crimped connection. But the crimper was near $100 plus the cost of each of the specific jaws for each connector type.

For anything below #10 wire or so I use a hydraulic crimper.

And in almost all cases I top it off with the same scheme you have with choice of wires and heat shrink.