Connector-- vocabulary breakdown.

Martin and Rich are right on what you call them. The ones I've seen were manufactured by Johnson Components and Keystone. Should be available from Digikey and Mouser.

My friend in High School used to build entrire projects with those!

Fahnestock

The ubiquitous "no tool" speaker connectors (and the no-tool terminal blocks) are more impressive, but they had to wait for plastic injection molding to be invented.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

No clue what they are or why I'd want a bushel, but they appear to be useful in arming bombs.

From:

If you really want to buy 'em (whatever 'em is)...

Ah! That's what they are! Didn't know what they were called, but no I wouldn't have a use for one, much less a bushel.

$26 for 200 clips.

They don't seem to be rare at all: but...

I like the way RCA did the speaker terminals on my boom box. They look like the 2nd set of spkr terms on that Mouser page, but no solder terminals.

The PCB slides into a notched out or cut out looking version of the terminal so it's up against the spring clamp, which IIRC is a metal contact, but it could just as well be an insulator.

The wire goes thru the hole and lays on a PCB pad. When you release the lever, it clamps the wire down to the PCB.

Smart and cheap, but a slight PITA to slide it all together. Sometimes the ME that goes into an electronic product/part is as impressive as the circuit/part itself.

I'm having a little vocabulary breakdown. What are the connectors called that you can plug the skinny part of a multimeter probe into, and where is a good place to get them?

-- "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it. " -- Gene Spafford, 1992

I saw something as a kid that used those and I think it was one of my train sets. Maybe the track power connection.

Pin Jacks?

ah, I give up.

Hah! You think those are bad? Try walking into your local supplier someday & asking for a bushel of Fahnstock clips-

H.

By Golly! I thought they had gone the way of the #6 Dry cell-

And a nice price break on the bushel load too :).

Do they have Pine board chassis kits too???

H.

They're called "phone jacks", because, historically, headphones used a pair of tips that size. Nowdays of course we use a 1/4" TRS jack for that purpose, but the name stuck.

How many do you need? I have a few.

Norm Strong

We don't tell those kind around here.

If you ask for Fahnestock clips, you'll get better results.

Found on the way to something else:

An Antique QSL Card from Harris Fahnestock

also:

with more information and another card.

Fahnestock clips are still available in many places, although they're more expensive than they used to be. For production testing of subassemblies with flying leads, they can still be the first choice. Cheap, easy to use, easily replaceable, good current rating, and just about impossible for a test operator to hurt themselves. The wire hole's too small to be a pinch point.

Thanks for the detour. Chris

-- Luhan Monat (luhanis 'at' yahoo 'dot' com) "The future is not what it used to be..."

Cool. I'd wondered what happened to them, but I never knew what they were called, either.

The OP could be describing what we call "tip jacks" with a "hole" about 1 mm in diameter.

Or alternatively "banana jacks" with the "hole' of about 3 mm.

Tip jacks are the ones I had in mind.

But I'd been wondering why the other end of the probes aren't simple banana. They're long and have a shroud, I'm not sure I can get a banana in there.

to keep you from getting electrocuted if you connect the one end to the circuit and forget to put the other end into the meter.

Yep. I believe the part inside the shroud is still a banana plug. You can still plug an unsheathed banana plug into the jack compatible with these.