[Milsurplus] [Boatanchors] Solder connectors

[Glen Zook]

I think that they are still available.  However, right now I have on the bench a Hammarlund HQ-129X in which someone used those to replace the paper capacitors.  Virtually every connection is bad.  Basically, the surface of the original component lead was not cleaned in any manner and, frankly, the solder did NOT "stick" to the original wire.  The solder worked fine with the new capacitor lead and the spring.  But, unfortunately, because of the surface corrosion the rosin from the solder flux just formed a barrier between the solder and the old lead resulting in very poor connections.

In almost every connection I had to take an Xacto knife and scrape the surface of the old wire to get it clean so that reheating and applying new solder would work.  Just reheating the connection did not help at all.  Since the leads had been shortened on the new capacitors and, as such, they were too short to be reused without redoing the actual solder joints.  It was a "toss up" between repairing the solder joints or else completely removing the capacitors and replacing them with new ones.  Since the actual capacitors were fine I went ahead and redid the solder joints.

Personally, I don't use these when repairing/restoring "boat anchors".  I go ahead and remove the original component from the terminal, tube pin, etc.  When the time required to physically clean every original (cut off) lead enters into the equation it takes less time to completely remove the original component and then redo the terminal, etc.

Glen, K9STH

Website:  http://k9sth.com


--- On Tue, 8/24/10, BOB <hoopmonk at snet.net> wrote:

Years ago I remember seeing small spring like connectors for butt connecting  two wires such as resistor or cap leads. Does anyone know if they are still available and if so where?