This week, I’m talking about electrical system work on my tractor. If you have no idea what I’m working on, I’ve got a 1939 Ford 9N tractor that I bought needing a good bit of work, and this series of 4 posts is documenting the repair process.
(Comments from Blogger)
2017-11-22 by dude mcginty
No soldering of the crimped connections? I got guilted into doing that for my car’s rewire job by the tons of comments from internet experts about the connections eventually wiggling free if only crimped. I have to assume a tractor’s connections experience way more wiggle forces than a car’s. Perhaps it’s overkill but my “crimping tool” was a vise, not a proper crimping tool. Anyway, fun read per usual!
2017-11-22 by Russell Graves
Soldering tends to create a brittle wire end that can crack.
If I understand properly, crimped connections are the only connections allowed for aviation use, and that’s a high vibration environment. A proper crimped connection should cold weld the wiring and terminal together - I haven’t cut mine apart to see, but I can put an awful lot of force in them.
2017-11-29 by Ned Funnell
I got a crash course in crimping one week when I was tasked with setting up a new Schleuniger auto strip/crimp machine at work years back. The guy doing the setup and training taught me the same thing- the crimp should apply enough force to fuse the wires together and into the surface of the connector on a metallurgical level. That level of force is somewhat less than would be needed to start shearing individual strands off, but more than is required to make them look squished together by a great degree. I suspect that hand crimping anything over 12ga with a generic pliers-style crimper is inadequate.