Re: Low cost coax connectors

JosephKK <joseph_barrett@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> hath wroth:

About 25 years ago, my employer embarked on yet another bean
counting
cost reduction adventure. Someone decided that all the coax
cables
connectors going between boards was too expensive. So, I
contrived a
stamped, board mounted, receptacle. That by itself wasn't very
interesting as those were already being sold by AMP. I eliminated
the coax plug by simply tinning the coax cable braid and the
center wire. We were using RG188a/u, which is the PTFE dielectric
version of
RG174a/u. Cut the end off squarely and remove the outer jacket.
Tin
the outer braid being carful not to let the braid bluge. Then run
it through a rotary blade stripper to trim the tinned braid to
length,
expose some dielectric, and strip the center conductor. Tin the
center conductor, trim, and you have the world's cheapest coax
plug.

<gasp> Oh man, I haven't gone that far yet...

Well, you asked for something cheaper than an RCA phono connector
pair and tinning the coax is certainly cheaper.

Not too sure about that, that is semi-skilled labor intensive.

Agreed. It was difficult to automate. However, it replaced an
equally labor intensive crimping operation using a very noisy
Amp-o-lectric connector cruncher using various connectors like these:
<http://catalog.tycoelectronics.com/TE/bin/TE.Connect?C=10029&M=FEAT&P=10307&U=&BML=&LG=1&I=13&G=G>
The tinned coax was adequate, but the quality varied radically
depending on who was doing the tinning. After about 1.5 years of
trying to control an inherently tricky process, along with increasing
production requirements, we went back to the crimped connectors. We
never even tried to build a proper robot or outsource the coax cable
production. The final blow was when a quality consultant identified
such manual labor intensive processes as unacceptable. The PCB's and
test fixtures were designed to handle both connector types, so the
reversion was fairly painless.

Somewhat later, I proposed various fixtures, fixes, tweaks, and
improvements, that I thought might have saved the idea, but nobody was
interested.

Today, I suspect that I could automate the process. It really depends
on how quickly I could heat and tin the braid without generating a
large heat affected zone. With solid Teflon dielectric, that's
possible. With polyethylene, it's much more difficult. With foam,
forget it.

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@xxxxxxxxxx
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
.

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