Loose wiring or improper connection is one of the common reasons why there is always failure related to your electrical components. Although making wire connections is a straight forward task to do, it is often neglected or done without thinking a negative impact that may result from loose wires such as causing lost connections, providing poor signals or even failure of your electrical equipments.
What you need to do:
- Crimper (or needle nose pliers if you’re really good)
- Wire (24 -26 gague usually)
- Crimp pins
- Housings (possibly)
- Crimping tool
Connectors
Method:
- First of all, you must choose the right connectors because the crimp connector comes in sizes keyed onto the gauge of the wire. For those of you who are not sure about the gauge of the wire to crimp your connector to, you need to check it using a wire gauge. Most of the crimping tools have a built-in wire gauge enabling you to check the wire’s size. The crimp connector must not be too large or too small in order for it to not slip off the wire.
- Then you need to strip the insulation off of the wire for crimping the connector. It should be having at least 3/8 inch of bare wire being exposed for this purpose.
- After that, you need to slide the wire into the crimp connector and when you are using a multi-strand conductor you have to twist it allowing the wire to tightly wound. By doing this, your individual strands would not be stuck when you start to insert the wire into the crimp connector.
- Next step to do is to take the crimping tool and place your crimp connector into it. Most of the crimping tools in the market are designed with specific openings to cater for different gauge crimp connectors.
- Make sure that you determine and choose the right and correct size. It normally comes with two different ‘levels’ on the tooth of the tool and the purpose of this is to ensure that the insulation channel has a big crimp than the wire channel because the stripped wire has a smaller diameter than the insulation. As for the crimping tool that does not have two different sizes on the tooth, you need to make two crimps where one of it is for the insulation and also using a smaller size, crimp the wire.
- After that, you have to squeeze the crimping tool tightly before releasing it and then, give a gentle tug to the wire making sure that it is firmly connected into your crimp connector.
Additional Reading:
Connections in Electronic Assemblies (Manufacturing Engineering and Materials Processing)
Circuitbuilding Do-It-Yourself For Dummies
