Alan Jones <[email protected]> wrote: > >Crimping requires a lot less skill than soldering, that was my point. I'm >not an electrical engineer but I've always used crimping for my speaker >building and car stereo projects. I've never experienced breakage of wire >strands, and have found crimped connections to be much more reliable than my >pitiful attempts to solder. > >Solder is a poor conductor and I would expect a decent crimp connection to >conduct better, perhaps someone has tested this somewhere (not sure how one >would test this). > >I would also expect oxidation of copper wires kept dry to be negligible, but >can't quantify this. > >I know that when I make your device I will use crimping, so maybe we can >learn more from my direct experience. > >Alan
Alan, it is true that solder has a higher resistance than copper or silver. However, a good solder joint has much lower resistance due to the filet joining the two materials. It has much larger area than the simple contact between two metals, and can greatly reduce the resulting contact resistance. All electronic instruments and appliances, from your pop-up toaster to your computer use soldered connections. I am an electrical engineer with over 50 years of experience, and have 6 patents awarded, so I do speak from experience. Your speaker wires are probably 16 gauge or higher, and you are connecting stranded wire to stranded wire. This is a good range for crimped connections. The leads in the battery connection are much finer, perhaps 24 or 26 gauge. They must connect to the solid leads of a through-hole resistor. Trying to crimp fine stranded wire against a solid copper lead makes a very unreliable connection. You do not know how many strands you haev damaged, and you cannot see the resulting connection to verify it is going to be reliable. Oxidation depends on where you live. Arizona and Colorado are high desert plateaus. It is very dry. When I lived there during my 30 years in the US, I never had any problems with corrosion. Then I move back to Ontario, Canada. It is humid, and we get plenty of acids from the Westerly winds that blow across the Great Lakes from the US. I have never seen such contamination problems. I started losing valuable instruments as the connections began to corrode. I have a basket full of old dvms and other meters that have failed due to corrosion. My expensive Fluke dvm just gave up and died, and I completely lost my Tektronix sampling scope due to intermittent operation due to corrosion. I no longer buy expensive American instruments since they simply will not last in this environment. Fortunately, ther are plenty of Chinese suppliers who have come out with very high performance instruments that are well designed and perform extremely well, are extremely cheap, and seem to be immune to the effects of corrosion. For example, the Rigol DS1052E oscilloscope sells for $399, and it can be easily modified to increase the bandwidth to 400MHz. I have two, and will soon dispose of my Tektronix 2647B scopes, which may sell for over $2,000 on eBay. I am also having extremely good results with the Tenma dvms. They seem to be immune to corrosion, and are working extremely well. But other dvms from China do not last. So some products work well, and others do not. The only way to find out is to try them and see what happens. All this experience is extremely valuable. I will certainly include it in future products that I design, and incorporate the lessons in the Silvercell assembly. For this reason, I strongly recommend finding someone who can solder the three simple connections needed in the SilverCell. I will list methods of finding these people in the assembly details. But you are free to experiment with crimping since it will cost little to try. If it doesn't work, there is a ready solution. I am pleased to hear you indicate that you may try to implement the SilverCell process for yourself. Your results will definitely be of interest to others. However, they should be presented in the Yahoo forum, since my work here is almost complete and I will soon be wrapping things up and leaving the group. Thanks, Mike Monett SilverCell -- The Silver List is a moderated forum for discussing Colloidal Silver. Rules and Instructions: http://www.silverlist.org Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe> Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.html Off-Topic discussions: <mailto:[email protected]> List Owner: Mike Devour <mailto:[email protected]>
