Heavy duty cable soldering?

are these the plastic connector that push together in a straight line ?

I forget the name , but usually they have a straight lug for each cable in the plastic housing

all the ones I have seen were both crimped and soldered

and a map gas type enzymatic will do just fine

use acid free solder though,

Anderson connectors.

A fair few of the aftermarket ones are crimped strain relief with a grubscrew clamp for the conductor.

Never been sure of how safe they are for high current (the grubscrew ones that is) - I've been looking at using one to run a 12V winch and don't much fancy sticking 350A through it.

P.

When I do things like this I use an acetlyene/air torch, but the propane one would be just fine. If the heat source is too small you tend to cook the wire insulation because it takes a long time to get things up to temperature. The one thing to watch for is that stranded wire will wick the solder away from the joint if you keep feeding it in.

One way to prevent the capllary action from doing this is to a) place heat shrink tubing over the wire, b) strip it back a bit farther than it needs to be, c) clamp a hemostat or small visegrip on the wire which will prevent the solder from wicking beyond the grabbed region, and then d) slip the tubing over the extra exposed bit and shrink in place after the joint is done. Depending on the size of the wire you might not have any trouble with this however.

Jim

Anderson Powerpole connectors.

Oh, youbetcha - a 20W iron won't even get it warm. They make soldering irons in the 150W - 200W range that can do it (and even then it will take a while on the 175A and larger sizes) but they look more like a big club.

A propane/air torch should be plenty hot enough, but you don't want to use regular solder, as the Powerpole connector is silver plated. I would use a high percentage silver bearing solder, so if any slops out of the cup and onto the mating area it won't degrade the mating surface too much.

Get a fresh contact terminal and clamp it into a vise with the cup and wire end up to work on it.

I read through the Anderson book a few weeks ago - Ideally, you get a special four-indent crimper and mechanically crimp the wire into the terminal cup before you solder it for best conductivity - that way it can't heat up and come apart. But you don't have to.

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What's that Lassie? You say that Paul S. Brown fell down the old rec.crafts.metalworking mine and will die if we don't mount a rescue by Mon, 06 Sep 2004 20:44:17 +0100:

I's use a crimped or soldered anderson SB-350 for that. In the forklifts that I drove at my last job, they could take 600 amp peak loads.