Need Help!- Quick Disconnect cable connectors?

[jeffmorris]

I need quick disconnect cable connectors that don't require soldering. Any suggestions?

[lowpull]

Molex type connectors.

[Thazul]

I think radioshack has some Molex, here's where I got mine though:
https://www.alliedelec.com/images/pr...irtualcatalog/
Page 201 for the index of connectors, page 217-219 for Molex type.

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Andy

[Gir]

Well unfortunately you'll always have to solder the wires onto your cable connector (hopefully that's not what you're trying to avoid :\ ). If you have any old computers laying around, scavenge some molex connectors from them. Most computers will have anywhere form 4-8 usually (maybe more). That's what I'm doing.

[lowpull]

Not so, I bought crimp on sockets and pins. no soldering

[jeffmorris]

I have computer cables with 9-pin "D" connectors but I may not have enough male and female connectors. I'm not sure if cables made by different companies have same color wires. I think that there's two kinds of molex connectors. The ones that connect to disk drives are usually large white connectors with 4 pins and the ones that connect to motherboards are smaller female connectors and I don't think that there's male connectors. The stepper motors require five wires to work. Two of the wires coming from the stepper motors are connected together before being connected to the driver boards made by Probotix.

[Riceburner98]

I use 5 pin Molex connectors, they look just like the hard drive connectors but have 1 more pin. They are crimp connectors, but I never trust a crimp and always solder them. I have 4 wire steppers, and use the 5th pin for the braided ground shield on the cable, it ties back to chassis ground in the control box. We have several sets of different high-precision linear stages here at work, one of them is about 3' x 3', and has rather large stepper motors on it. They are using standard 9-pin serial port type connectors, and this is probably a $10,000 linear stage with some pretty good size steppers. So apparently just about any connector will work. The cables *look* like standard serial cables as well, but I don't know if the wires are larger inside or not..

[Regnar]

Here are some plastic cannon plugs. Its the same thing the military uses on aircraft just plastic. I know they make water tight connections to but I didnt seem them. The pins and sockets can be solder or crimp. What is nice about these connections is that they can only go together one way and then they are threaded on, so pretty much accident proof.

http://www.mouser.com/catalog/634/1240.pdf

[jeffmorris]

I found out that tools for crimping wires to connectors are EXPENSIVE! WHY?

[lowpull]

I bought my crimp tool, its a gc/waldom HT-1921. It costs about 20 bucks. This is not the tool if you are doing thousands of crimps, But for handful of connectors its not bad.

[Gir]

Not so, I bought crimp on sockets and pins. no soldering

I left that out since pretty much anyone who goes out and buys crimpers usually already has a soldering iron.

I found out that tools for crimping wires to connectors are EXPENSIVE! WHY?

Yup! A lot of them have a good bit going on mechanically and need to have adjustments built in for calibration and such. Especially the cannon connectors. Those crimpers are crazy expensive (for anything decent), but are very, very good. NASA uses a lot of the cannon connectors - they're very good, but their higher end stuff is definitely overkill for our application.

[Regnar]

Gir is right the nasa stuff is way out of our league. A military/nasa cannon plug goes for around 200.00 and the tooling goes up from there. The ones I showed you are around 8 dollars for 1 whole connection. The only tools I used was a pair of needle nose pliers and a stir stick from McDonalds