On Sunday 15 November 2020 23:37:41 Przemek Klosowski wrote: > On Sat, Nov 14, 2020 at 6:46 AM Gene Heskett <[email protected]> wrote: > > I have a 2" $70 Gibralter with very flat jaws. Does a great job of > > crimping. A year and 2-3 disconnects later, the cover is warped up > > in the middle and theres no connection for the 3 or 5 wires in the > > middle. Recrimp it and set your clock for 6 months. Wash rinse and > > repeat. I'm obviously tired of it. > > I saw faults like this, caused by a bad crimp. The individual wires > are supposed to slide into the y-shaped insulation displacement > blades, past the narrowing. If they don't, it's not a gas-tight > connection and fails eventually. > Maybe take the cover off, and inspect the cables and the blades---they > should poke through the insulation to a uniform height. If you're > (un?)lucky you may see some wires being just barely on the forks, not > fully in. You can use a flat blade screwdriver placed right behind the > forks to push individual wires down past the narrowing. This is by the > way not a bad way of crimping them in the first place, if you don't > have a proper crimper---and let me tell you that crimping 68-pin IDC > connectors in one shot is not easy. > > Properly done, the iDC are very reliable---a lot of equipment is using > them, and for dozens of years. Definitely not failing every year. > > By the way, the Russians and Bulgarians gate-for-gate-copied PDP and > IBM computers back in the seventies/eighties. THey were quite > unreliable; the difference was DEC and IBM used properly engineered, > good quality connectors, which were unavailable behind the Iron > Curtain.
A lesson Harris, the transmitter people, had to learn the hard way. They used a boatload of the 50 pin scsi-ii connectors in a 25kw AM tx originally sold to WSM in Nashville. It found its way to WV and one of the Ma and Pa stations here. I finally found its intermittent, one of those connectors that Harris had engineered every last inch of out and didn't at the time have any of that cable or connectors, so I took it apart after cutting it off with a razor blade, losing 1/2", and put it back on the cable. Rerouted to make it reach, it wasn't purty, but end of problem. But the hill with the tower on it slipped and took the tower down. Then the owner of the road to the site, who had given Steve an access easement right, died, his widow sold that property and despite such easements legally being carried thru the sale in WV, the new owner built a building, purposely blocking the road. Steve fought that in court and 5 years later won, but the building is still there. Steve got access, bulldozer only, from the back side of the hill and sold the tower remains and transmitter, loaded up the log building and moved it to the back yard at WHAW where its used as the dog house for a newer antenna tuner, and went back to 2500 watts daytime only. That legal battle, with judges siding with the property owner despite state law, cost Steve at least a million in legal fees, and 5 million in potential profits. Despite state law on easements when a property is sold, the guy with the biggest pocket still wins in WV. The old boy network is alive and well here. Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable. - Louis D. Brandeis Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene> _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
