Connectors, was [sdiy] bit one

[harrybissell]

Arrgh... the white ones are not AMP... the Diplomate is black, and has
full metal contact on BOTH sides of the pin, excellent retention force.

I think that Augat made those wihte ones, iirc. They DO suck !!!

otoh... AMP is now owned by Tyco... kiss of death for product quality imho

H^) harry

The Peasant wrote:

> I strongly agree with using high quality/gold pins and sockets. The equipment
> that I have encountered that have had problems with tin connectors includes
> everything from industrial/laboratory equipment from manufacturers such as
> Baush & Lomb, & Fisher Scientific, to multi-million $$ X-ray machines from
> Varian, Siemens and others.
>
> The smart manufacturers like Varian are now all using gold plated machined
> contacts exclusively, with extremely high reliability. When a signal has to go
> through a dozen or so sets of contacts to get from source to input circuit,
> you really don't have much choice.
>
> The worst connectors that I have found are the rectangular pin in-line white
> plastic amp/molex type with tin plated contacts. The female contacts are one-
> sided and don't have a lot of contact force, I think the molex KK type is one
> example. They are similar to computer mother board power supply plugs in pcs,
> but considerably looser and with less insertion force (the computer type plugs
> are OK.) Especially where there are temperature changes (power supplies),
> these type quickly oxidize and go intermittant. Many small linear and
> switching power supplies use these connectors, I've seen them fail many, many
> times.
>
> Take care,
> Doug
> ______________________
> The Electronic Peasant
>
> www.electronicpeasant.com
>
> Quoting Scott Stites <scottnoanh at peoplepc.com>:
>
> > Hi gang,
> >
> > I work in the customer service department for a test equipment manufacturer,
> > and
> > the term "Gold Pin Mod" is ubiquitous to everything that was produced up
> > until a
> > few years ago, when my department started forcing its hand.
> >
> > It has to do with tin connectors, particularly on but sometimes not limited
> > to,
> > the power supplies.  Invariably, as time progressed, the equipment would
> > become
> > unreliable, jumpy, -generally screwed up in other words - and the customer
> > would
> > send it in.  Automatically, we'd replace the pins in the power supply
> > connectors
> > with gold plated pins, and soon we just started doing it automatically to
> > anything that was in warranty.  Worked like a charm in exactly 100% of the
> > cases.
> >  Putting in tin connectors only bought a bit of time, and we are of the
> > philosphy
> > that you don't clean anything - you replace (these are high dollar boxes to
> > begin
> > with).  I finally moved up to 'core' development teams, and I *never* would
> > sign
> > off on anything that didn't have gold plated connectors on the power
> > supplies,
> > BOM price be damned.
> >
> > Of course, these are service monitors that get a lot of field work in all
> > kinds
> > of environments, but all the same - if I had a tasty vintage synth like that,
> > I'd
> > raid Fort Knox and see if there wasn't some way to put in gold plated
> > connectors.
> >  Just a thought......
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Scott