DFP cabling, Pendant moving, SOLVED.... part 3

Yep, sometimes ya gotta just cut open a special cable out of desperation to actually see what's inside.

It sounds as though you did a good job of structurally reinforcing the splice area to prevent any flexing. Wire that small is fairly durable as stranded, but where it's soldered, it'll start breaking off those fine strands very quickly if any movement or vibration is present. Anchoring a larger section of the cable near the splice to a solid surface (splint) should prevent any movement. I believe you don't want to know what could happen if any of those wires becomes intermittent. That's one advantage of those horrible molded connector bodies.. they hold the fine wires stationary, although I prefer replaceable/repairable connectors.

FWIW, liquid rosin flux (available in small bottles) makes a lot of soldering tasks much easier, and even a few ounces will last a long time.

Show us some of the fancy tricks this machine will do to a proper chunk of metal when you start making some money with it.

I will slit my wrists if anything goes wrong with that cable!!

Zinc Chloride (plumbing flux) does splendidly!

Well, it will do as fancy as the cadcam you program. In my case, since I use only graph paper, it's not fancy at all, just long wide stuff. But which saves enormous time/trouble over finagling in a smaller vmc.

I'll actually be "publishing" the design of my stuff, as "defensive publishing", patent-wise. See Don Lancaster on the uselessness of patents. PLenty of vids, as well.

Well.. maybe now isn't a good time to bring it up then.. BUT, Z-C flux should never be used on electronic circuit components. It's way too harsh, better for uhm... plumbing. Any residue will continue to eat away at the small wires, and with stranded wire, any liquid such as hot past flux, will wick back into the strands a short ways.

I was gonna say you might've been better off just crimping the wires, but you'd already declared a success. Proper crimping and strain relief eliminates the fragile boundary that's always present with soldering stranded wire.

Good one, man.. also liked the one for wifey about the topless hostesses at the show. But seriously, wrist slitting is a bit Japanese schoolgirl.. may I make a suggestion? Fill the coolant system with superglue, hit Start for a long routine, and leap onto the mill table.

Yeah, I did some patent-sense research in the '90s and have read Don's very well organized tutorial, and I think I recall suggesting it to you some time ago.

That's not good. When it fails, you will know where to look. Zinc Chloride flux is a bad thing to use on small wires. It will corrode your connections over time.

Since you buzzed the cable out as you built it, did you document all the connections? Maybe you can get some cable and connectors and make up a continuous cable without any splices to have ready for the future.

Good luck, tm

Seconded - the zinc chloride plumber's flux may cause it to fail over time. Probably will, but nothing is an absolute. Worse, if it's on a ground lead it might not outright fail from the signal going open, but it'll get glitchy. Ground loops on video lines causing ghosting and general weirdness.

Don't rush (because that triples the cost) but now is the time to call Haas and either have them make you an extra-long 30-foot cable the next time they have a batch made up, and they might get more call for them once it's known they exist.

Or see if they can make an Extension Cable with male and female connections, or a "Gender Bender" to connect two cables end-to-end without a lot of drama.

-->--

On electrical connections?? Kerrist!

ZnCl plumbing flux is acidic, and *corrosive*. NEVER use it on electrical work.

Expect your joints to disappear over time.

Well, glad you got it figured out! I do this sort of stuff often, and have the right gear, so it is easier. Yes, the good cable almost certainly has twisted pairs of wires. I'll bet the bad ones just have bundles of random wires in a jacket. You wouldn't know the difference just with an Ohmmeter, but it DOES make a big difference.

Jon

If that's true, I indeed wish you hadn't told me.... :(

But really, ZnCl2?? I figgered that would be as mild as they come.... I'm surprised it even acts as a flux!! Sheeit, you can EAT ZnCl2.... iirc, it's what's multi-vitamins..... lol

Dat old 2x4 handy box -- attached the "wrong way" -- shore does mucky up my nice cable.... LOL

Actually, I'd be a pill kind of guy, if it came to that.... But really, if it does come to that, ahm takin hoards with me.... all from Wall Street....

Well-organized, eh??? LOL Not Lancasters strong point!!! But really, if that was you, thank you for that. What an eye opener!!! Really, some of the most original thinking/exposition I've read in a long time. . And after reading alladat, I STILL headed for the patent route anyway, until real reality reared its very ugly head, which became crystal-clear bec of my Lancaster readings. A lawyer that was recommended to me sent me a whole bill of patent particulars, and man, it was like reading a Riot Act.... I said, Holy Shit, Lancaster is more correck than he proly knows!!!!! Getting into that patent shit is like being into a loan shark with a vic that never ever ends. Sorta like fukn Domain Names.... what a trap DAT is!!!!!

Don Lancaster pointed out that patenting your own stuff can also hamstring you with your own effing product!! Not likely, but one of many possible scenarios.

Really, one of the great things I've learned on the web. The other being Edison circuits, when I was converting all my fuse panels to breaker boxes, and found that every fukn one of them was wired incorrectly!!!!!! And I had a bunch.... with cloth-covered #14 wire.... it's a miracle my house is still standing!! On alt.home.repair, from that guy Fretwell, iirc. knowledgeable guy, a life/house-saver, in my case.

Dayum -- universal consensus on ZnCl2..... No herculean effort goes un-sabotaged, eh??

Well, all good advice all around. It's working now, when I can breathe, I'll arrange for a more permanent solution. I don't know if Haas can accommodate me, since these cables are almost f'sure subbed out and rare to begin with. What I can also do is eventually find the female PCB/board connectors, and make my own gender changer/coupler. And buy two new cables!!

Or, I can just re-splice.

It looks like my new re-located pendant is going to be the gift that keeps on taking....

You can drink ethanoic acid, AKA acetic acid, AKA vinegar, too, but that'll see off electrical joints, as well.

Voltages make the reaction aggressive.

Look at the bright side. It was an educational experience. Most pay much more for that.

ALL electrical tech manuals warn against acid fluxes and acid core solders in doing electrical joints. Surprised you didn't know that.

It's going to fail, just a matter of WHEN. Best cut the joint out and redo it properly. You CAN get tinning pastes that have solder and paste flux ground together, sold for tinning irons but not limited to that. RS has a quarter-sized tin of that for $5-6 bucks, works well for the intended purpose and I've used it for doing really fine stranded splices. It's intended for electrical work, too, so has activated rosin flux, the ONLY stuff that should be used for electrical work.

As to the failure mode, they don't call it ACID flux for nothing. Zinc chloride attacks copper, which is why you get that fine and easy tinning from it, it dissolves oxides and a bit of the copper, leaving a nice chemically clean surface for the solder. Unfortunately, it just doesn't disappear. Those chlorides keep eating and those fine wires will disappear as blue-green sludge, sooner or later. It'll wick up the inside of the insulation as well, so don't leave it too long or you'll be chopping out more than you want.

DVI cables have a number of standards, some for analog video, some for just digital video, some for analog and digital video and some for two- channel and bidirectional. If you don't like one, you can always find another. But you DO have to pay attention to the tags on the bag or wrapper. And sometimes they lie, too.

For doing those computer-type cables, I made up a jig many years ago that uses a couple of wooden snap clothespins glued to a wooden base. Works well for a third and fourth hand. A later version I made up allows one pin to slide for joint alignment.

Stan

Ohhh, Nooooo! You probably ARE going to have problems. That is the WRONG stuff to use. I have a bottle of GC rosin flux, which dries to a crumbly plastic sort of benign dust over time, and rarely causes any trouble, although it can become conductive if the climate is damp enough. But, the plumbing flux will eat up wiring and connectors. it wicks under the plastic insulation and eventually the wires get eaten through! It will probably take a few years for it to fail. You might slide back some of the heat shrink in six months and see if this is happening. If you see green goop, then you are in trouble.

Jon

Yeah, Don Lancaster, Edison circuits, and now Don't use Zinc Chloride....

Not disputing that I've got an eventual repair job ahead due to zinc chloride, but zinc chloride is not, afaict, an *acid* flux.

It may be corrosive, but not bec of acidity. The following reaction proly explains the corrosion: Zn(2+) + Cu(0) ---> Zn(0) + Cu(2+), ie, Cu metal (Cu(0) ) is going "into solution" or iow, dissolving.

So nothing really acidic about this, but still corrosive, over time. The reason corrosion does not occur more quickly is because Zn is "higher" in the electrochemical series, and when Zn(0) forms, it tends to shoot back its electrons to Cu, keeping Cu intact -- for a time. But eventually the statistics of the equilibrium do wear away the Cu, apparently.

If the chemistry were reversed, ie, the wire were Zinc metal, and the flux CuCl2, the corrosion would proly be complete in mebbe a matter of hours or days, bec Zn(0) + Cu(2+) ----> Zn(2+) + Cu(0) would proceed forward until completion, ie, no more Zn metal, again, for the same reason, that Zn is higher in the electrochemical series, driving the reaction forward to completion.

Nuthin like ad hoc realizations..... ad hoc = Too Late, in this case.

Was it ever DFP in the first place as wiki has DFP as 20 pin

I haven't used them, but the "About Us" section says that they will make custom cables:

yeah, it's not a big deal.

It will be much easier to resplice the cable later once you know what do do. I love forgetting a piece of heat shrink tubing or strain relief netting stuff and having to start all over again when redoing connectors.

Telco guys have no problem splicing hundreds, even thousands of pairs, they have some cool tools, but it's still a manual process to line things up. It's the same for fiber, but that stuff is more fragile.

Oh, fwiw, by virtual chemical definition, ZnCl2 is a *salt*, just like sodium, potassium, calcium chlorides. And all are indeed corrosive, albeit in a variety of ways.. NaCl corrodes concrete!

Yes, it is a salt but dissolved in water, it becomes quite acidic. A 6M solution will have a pH near 1.0.