Soldering bananna plug tips????

I poke a bit of rosin flux from Radio Shack down the hole, hold it in a small pair of vise grips, heat the side until solder flows in the hole. 80W weller :) mk

You're not getting the banana plug hot enough, or it's dirty. The suggestion to get an 80W iron is a good one. Any time you solder anything you should get both pieces hot enough to melt solder. If your plug won't melt the solder no matter how long you hold an iron to it then the iron's too small. I make it a habit to always touch the solder to the pieces I'm soldering, _not_ the iron, unless it's some exceptional circumstance.

If you get your pieces hot enough to melt solder and the solder won't stick then they're dirty, or you're trying to solder the unsolderable. Just about anything but tin or old solder should be clean and shiny bright -- scrub it with brass wool or a Scotchbrite pad, or scrape it with a knife or something until it is. There are metals that are difficult to impossible to solder or braze, but a connector that's _made_ for soldering shouldn't use them.

It has to be very clean and bright, heat it until the solder flows. I find my chisel point 40 watt Weller does the job very nicely. Soldering is an art form. Difficult to describe. Easy to demonstrate. I have taught many the art and they solder like pros.

Red S. Red's R/C Battery Clinic

I would recommend you first "tin" the wires. To do this, heat the wire and add some rosin core solder (for wires). Next you might do this to the bananna plugs, but it shouldn't be necessary. Now heat the bananna plugs up and slide the wires in. Keep heat on until the solder flows.

Recently I solder two bananna plugs for my Accu-Cycle Charger, and I did it with only a 25W iron without any problems.

Mr Akimoto

anderson power poles handle more current, have a positive connection to them, can be stacked and uniquely keyed, and will last the lifetime of your application.

I got clued into these beauties last year from my ham radio connections, and have converted all our model rocketry stuff to it. easy to connect and disconnect, stays connected, and the contact area is much larger than what banana plugs have.

the plus side is, all of our rocket gear is 12v, so is all the ham gear I got. also same for the large camcorder we have, plus the dead camcorder which gave us 2 more batteries for the rocket launchers.

nope, not affiliated with anderson. these connectors are worth talking about.

I heat the plug with a torch, takes too long to heat with an iron. Then heat the wire with an iron push the wire in the hole, put the solder on, and walla!

| anderson power poles handle more current, have a positive connection to | them, can be stacked and uniquely keyed, and will last the lifetime of your | application.

We have lots of connector types to choose from. Power Poles are only one of them. They're nice connectors, though I wonder why the ham radio community has taken such a liking to them and not some of the others. (Yes, I do know their list of features.)

For hooking up batteries to planes, my current favorite are the Deans connectors. The Astroflight Zero Loss connectors are even better, but they cost about 3x as much, so nevermind :)

The only time I use bananna plugs is when something already has the sockets, like with my chargers or with a field box power panel (which I've found to be rather useless, by the way -- I'd much rather everything just have it's own battery.) But I digress ...

If you buy your bananna plugs from Hobbico, get the heavy duty ones. They cost more, but the standard ones are crap.

As for how to solder them, you just need to get the bananna plug itself hot enough to melt the solder, get some solder in the hole and put the wire in there and let it cool. Then pull on it hard and it shouldn't come out. If it does, you did something wrong, try again. Tinning the wire beforehand isn't absolutely needed, but it can help, so do it.

But they don't work well on a panel that already has banana sockets.

For everything else, now...

A valid point, Tim... A short pigtail with a set of 'naner plugs on one end and Powepole/Sermos on t'other solves the prob.

I use the FMA Nova 250S and made adapters to everything I charge long ago....

If you use an adaptor tha plugs a powe pole socket into a banana socket, wouldn't you still be using banana plugs? I think banana plugs work pretty well, why bother with the extra work?

Simple enuf....

The Nova 250S has banana jacks on it's output.... I have Sermos connectors on my batteries. The adapter gets me from point A to Point 2..........

A nice Sermos to banana plug adapter can be made by just soldering 5/32 ID brass tubing on the Sermos inserts and then seating them and then covering them with heat shrink.

Red S.

connections,