wiring for rocket scientists

[river1]

http://workmanship.nasa.gov/

later jim

[58Apache]

I worked 18 years as an electronic tech for the Military. They required recertification by yearly training and inspection of your work. Even in the Army with things that were going in a heavy tank, the solder joints needed to be perfect with not too much solder. "Perfect" meant proper mechanical position or wrap depending on the joint/terminal, exact amounts of stripped section, exact amount of wire to accommodate the terminal and probably a hundred things I have forgot.

Remember that they have weight limits on loads going up into space and lead is heavy. Solder is about 60% lead ..sometimes more.

Tanks and planes take a lot of stress, extreme vibrations, heat and cold extremes, and more. Failure is not an option. Lives depend on everything to work under extreme conditions.

In general, in my opinion, cars don't need soldering to NASA specs. However, for reliability, the joints still need to be very good solder joints. I had a LOT of training to include what's happening at the molecular level.

For this reason...understanding what's happening and why, I will never only crimp wires again. And if you have a proper solder joint, it will be almost as strong, and depending on the circumstance, be even stronger than a crimp.  Should you do both? Probably. But I'd rather have a solder only joint than a crimp only joint given the choice.

Different wires and different terminals have different coatings over copper, and may not have copper at all. In many cases you may be putting dissimilar metals against one another in a crimp only connection. Dissimilar metals react chemically after awhile. Add in any introduction of other contamination, extreme weather, humidity, and less than perfect crimps, in my opinion it's only a matter of time before you have at least some additional resistance at the connection, if not complete failure at some point in time.

Solder is the only way for me. But a bad solder joint is as bad as a bad crimp. It needs to be done right.

It may sound sick to some, but I look forward to wiring my car and I know it will be the most satisfying part of the entire project!

                                                Steve

[brti]

How about a couple of pics showing good and bad soldering???
I'd like to see a "perfect" soldered joint too.