MTA-100 connectors

[Phil Allison]

Winfield Hill wrote:

--------------------

It's important to be able to remove and re-attach PCBs,
direct soldering can be a disaster.

** Win has misinterpreted my critical post of re his favourite multipins - as usual.

Fact 1.

The "hard wire" solution makes 100% good sense * IF * you are doing repairs for a living on equipment made in another country with NO service backup in yours and which is regularly subjected to harsh operating conditions.

Fact 2.

If the manufacture of high quality ( read expensive) equipment is your game, the solution is to use BETTER connectors.

Yes, gold plated IDC is good for small signal stuff and carefully crimped silver alloy for high current stuff - with plenty of contact area on the pins OR simply double or even triple up on the pins used for redundancy.

IME, gear made using the above methods has very high reliability.

Almost as good as fully hard wired....

FYI:

It is only with the latter type of construction where I see 20 plus year old gear that has been in regular, hard service with ZERO previous repairs.



..... Phil

 

On 17 Sep 2019 17:00:26 -0700, Winfield Hill <winfieldhill@yahoo.com>
wrote:

Tim Williams wrote...

failure rates. Say if 1% of pins fail after 10 years,
that's still not all that many connectors affected,
out of the protos and test equipment you've made in
that time; and they're easily serviced, if they're
still local anyway.

That's my situation. We've made thousands of amazing
instrunments over the last 30 years, but few have been
used for more than 10 years. Our precious technician
died 10 years ago, R.I.P. Since then it's been a matter
of assembly simplicity. For us now, if it fails, snip
wires, re-punch, and get 10 more good years of life.

We've used about 11,000 of those connector pairs over the last 20+
years. They have been very reliable.

 

[Bob Engelhardt]

On 9/17/2019 8:00 PM, Winfield Hill wrote:

... I recently spent
two days to repair a pair of failed Keithley 2400 SMUs.
...

I respect that these are valuable instruments that deserve to be
repaired and your do-what-needs-to-be-done attitude, BUT seriously ...
aren't there design jobs that make better use of your skills? Doing
repairs, especially a lot of soldering, seems to be a very inefficient
use of your time. Diagnosis, yes, but soldering? Your lab definitely
needs another tech.

 

[Winfield Hill]

jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote...

Tim Williams wrote...

failure rates. Say if 1% of pins fail after 10 years,
that's still not all that many connectors affected,
out of the protos and test equipment you've made in
that time; and they're easily serviced, if they're
still local anyway.

We've used about 11,000 of those connector pairs over
the last 20+ years. They have been very reliable.

The tin-plated ones? Or did you find a gold version?


--
Thanks,
- Win

 

On 18 Sep 2019 06:20:45 -0700, Winfield Hill <winfieldhill@yahoo.com>
wrote:

jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote...

Tim Williams wrote...

failure rates. Say if 1% of pins fail after 10 years,
that's still not all that many connectors affected,
out of the protos and test equipment you've made in
that time; and they're easily serviced, if they're
still local anyway.

We've used about 11,000 of those connector pairs over
the last 20+ years. They have been very reliable.

The tin-plated ones? Or did you find a gold version?

Tin. We use them for power, in clean environments.

It's important to use the right wire (AWG and insulation
type/thickness) and a good shoot-in process.

We licensed one design to a semi equipment company, and they sent that
to the low-bid CM, and they did mess some up, wrong wire and bad
tooling.

 

[Winfield Hill]

Bob Engelhardt wrote...

On 9/17/2019 8:00 PM, Winfield Hill wrote:
... I recently spent
two days to repair a pair of failed Keithley 2400 SMUs.
...

I respect that these are valuable instruments that deserve to be
repaired and your do-what-needs-to-be-done attitude, BUT seriously ...
aren't there design jobs that make better use of your skills? Doing
repairs, especially a lot of soldering, seems to be a very inefficient
use of your time. Diagnosis, yes, but soldering? Your lab definitely
needs another tech.

Yes, but I thought, swap two boards, how hard can it be?
Answer: too hard! We absolutely need another technician.


--
Thanks,
- Win