Monday, September 26, 2011

Crimping a modular connector without a cimp tool

So it turns out that the guy at the local electronics store near the university is too damn cheap to lend me a crimp tool for literally 10 seconds, and would rather charge me $5 to merely crimp a header onto the end of a cable. So I decided to crimp the modular header (for ICD) onto a the cable myself. I decided to instead use a flat ribbon cable (like the computer IDE cable) since they're thinner and much more flexible than the 6 wire telephone cable I bought. The wire-to-wire pitch is slightly larger than for a normal telephone type (6p6c) cable so you can't insert it directly, but if you pull the individual wires apart to about 5mm from the end, and then put them in, it works out well. Crimping without a tool was a snap - took only about a minute with nothing more than a flat head screwdriver to push in the tab as well as each of the contacts.

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