Soldering Deans type connectors.

[Happy Days]

When you come to solder a battery / ESC leads to a Deans socket & plug assembly it’s often found to be a little difficult for a couple of reasons.

1/ How to hold the plug or socket in place while soldering the leads,…and

2/ Sometimes the plastic that forms the bulk of the plug / socket goes a bit soft due to the heat being used to solder the wires to relatively large connector pins. (You have to get the pins up to a reasonable temperature to allow the solder to ‘take’ to them.) This softening of the plastic can allow the pin / socket to move out of alignment so when you try to fit the plugs together again, after you’ve attached the cables, the dam things wont fit together!!! :!:

The solution that I use is:-

a/ To hold the deans plug in a pair of pliers or grips with a elastic band around the handle to maintain grip on the plugs. (as shown)

b/ To stop the  connector pins / sockets from moving out of alignment due to the plastic getting soft…..Fit the male and female plug parts together before you start soldering. That way they will always remain aligned.
Whether you get the problem of the pins not aligning, after you’ve soldered the cables, really depends upon your soldering skills. Speed is the key, but being able to make a good joint quickly is easier said than done! So keeping the male and female parts together helps to alleviate the problem of possible miss-alignment.



K.

[EI1638]

Nice Keith.

I do something similar. I find a small vice does the job nicely as it won't move (as easily).

The other sneaky thing I do is that I have hardwood tweezers (some spruce off cuts and rubber bands) that I use to hold the wire in position during the operation. They come in handy for all sorts of connectors, don't damage the wires and save the pinkies.

I know I have some very bad soldering habits as its not something I do a lot of, but tinning (pre soldering)  the wire and connectors helps a lot too, as the solder is already in situ and all that is needed is to get it to flow again. It doesn't take much heat to tin the deans pins, compared to the heat required to tin thicker silicon wires. And it means that I'm only holding the soldering iron and the wires during the opertion, and not the solder as well.
I use 'proper' cored electrical solder (the kind that is used to rework/fix electronic components), so no worries about flux.

I have one other trick for Deans. If you can get your hands on some 13 mm heatshrink it will fit over the Deans connector and when shrunk provides something other than the wires to grip when its time to insert/remove the connectors. If you are paranoid you can fill it with hot glue too.

I mostly use deans, but most of the above applies to all connector types. A block of wood with a suitable diameter hole holds the pins/sockets in place for soldering for most other types.

Its pecular that we use soldered connections when most (all) professional systems use crimps, but I guess that the cost of a proper crimp tool makes soldering much more economically attractive at the kind of volumes we need.

Chris

[Happy Days]

Yeah, good advice Chris. All soldered contacts should be ‘tinned’ first. That’s the proper way of creating a good electrical joint. If you don’t ‘tin’ the wires and contact points first you run the risk of getting a ‘dry joint’. (One that’s physically stuck together but that has a high electrical resistance when electricity is passing through it.)

One point Chris,…..when separating the connectors you should never pull on the wires. Grip the body of the plugs to pull them apart. Pulling on the cables weakens the soldered joint and can also cause the strands of the cable to break, which can cause the resistance of the connection to increase.
(In practise high resistance means the connector may get hot and reduce the amount of amps that can pass through the connector.)

K.

[Keith]

Thanks for that keith

[EI1638]

Keith,

Agreed, but sometimes it is really hard to just hold onto the deans, hence the large dia heat shrink trick. Less of a problem with other types of connectors as they tend to be physically larger and easier to grip (at least the ones I've used). Still prefer the deans though.

Chris