Rewire Ford Focus

Indeed. A properly designed terminal crimped properly with a proper tool is ideal. Those red blue and yellow devices satisfy non of those.

Well the CEGB used to happily use AMP CertiGrips. PIDGs aren't unusual either. Of course if you're buying cheap nasty ones then you'll get what you paid for.

I'll go along with that - and I've used crimp connectoras in a lot of situations, up to and including mil-spec, airborne. Which is quite fussy.

I've never liked pre-insulated crimps, and the cheap crimpers with just an arc to squash the crimp roughly towards the wire are a joke. For this loom repair job, bare butt (!) splice crimps and heatshrink would be the way to go. A bare crimp connector can be crimped well with needlenose pliers, once you know what it should look like, and if you do both sides separately and evenly. Much easier with a decent crimper though.

Solder can be fine in it's place - but you have to be able to make a good mechanical joint with the bare wires *first*, before you even apply the solder. Which you can't really do for a butt joint.

And you're too stupid to realise there's two versions with different spellings and definitions..

Indeed. I'm a truck driver but I make the effort to use decent spelling and punctuation.

Mr. Cellophane probably think lorry drivers are thick as shit but then posts with all the literacy of a 3 year old.

Solder and heatshrink? You think?

Only if you're crap at soldering. Crimped connections are prone to problems from corrosion.

I can guarantee you a soldered connection will be going long after the crimped one has corroded away.

Does nobody here tin the wires before soldering them together?

How many of them were subject to years of damp and water ingress?

Lots. For far more years than would be likely if used on a car. (I worked on the same site for 36 years!) Of course, there is no reason why a crimped connector (as opposed to a lug) could not be further protected using shrink sleeving in the same way as would be needed for a soldered joint.

Also, many of the crimp lugs I used were on moving systems (on filling and packaging production machines) where a soldered joint would literally have failed in minutes. I know, because I tried...

Many regulating bodies for electrical installations worldwide deprecated soldered joints long ago.

Chris.

No.

I *know*.

It's a reoccuring problem that I have to track down on some bikes I own/owned (the vibration on bikes is usually worse than on cars but the same thing applies to cars) - some alarm fitter solders a connection, covers it in heatshrink.

Five years down the line, you've got an intermittent fault that you finally track down to the broken connection inside the heatshrink tube, because the stiff connection has broken. If you solder it properly it's less prone to breakage but overall the issue is that you've got something flexible (two cables) joined together by something inflexible (the soldered joint) without any other form of mechanical protection.

Mind you, my favourites are those people who tin the end of a cable and then crimp on a connector...

I just don't get this "soldered joint falling to bits" thing. Am I missing something? I've just never come across one.

That's because the alarm manufacturers require heatshrinked soldered joints to be used in order to meet their certifications for Thatcham. Or at least they used to.

It was specifically mentioned in installation and certification literature on many.

When the solder lug is fitted, or a soldered joint is made, solder creeps up the cable by capillary action. This turns a flexible cable into a solid one. If subjected to frequent movement or vibration, the *cable* will break, usually at the point where the solder has stopped flowing into the cable. The industrial situation I was quoting would not be found in the car world.

TBH, as far as car wiring repairs are concerned, it's not a problem. A properly made solder joint, or a properly made crimped one, are more than capable of outlasting the vehicle. I just take issue with those who crimp the wrong size of lug on to a cable with a pair of side-cutters or whatever, and then claim that crimped joints are not suitable for car applications!

Chris

That's a reasonable point. Hovever, if you use adhesive heatshrink, and ties up the cables afterwards, you can avoid the problem. The fact is that if you use the solder as the electrical connection, then take care of the mechanical issue, you won't have a problem. As you say, the problem is the soldered area isnstiff, and the cable isn't. However, crimp connectors are stiff too, and solder takes up less space and is easier to strap up properly afterwards.

Thereby making sure the crimp doesn't work.....

Soldered joints can fail with vibration over time (dry joints that make your TV play up so you have to hit it), but in the stuation we're talking about, the most likely failure is the wire breaking where it meets the joint, as the joint is inflexible. Like others have said, crimps can be reliable, but you need good connectors, and a good tool (=£££££), whereas with a bit of skill, a good soldered joint is cheap for repair, and if you cable tie it properly, it will be fine.

And that's the key thing. A properly done joint of either type is good enough. However, to do crimps well, you need a good crimp tool, not the

1.99 one from the car shop. Similarly, if you solder a joint badly and don't protect it, it will break.

The message from Chris Bartram contains these words:

Proper strain relief is the key to long lived joints in vibrating applications. Crimped or soldered makes no odds, it's the waggling that kills them off. If it's soldered it'll fail where the solder stops and the strands are free to move, if it's crimped it'll fail where the bundle of strand leave the crimp.

That doesn't help, it just spreads the solder up the wire moving the failure point.