I need some of the strip from Berg or Dupont connectors

For bussing on my protoboards I often use solder wick braid.

To find that connector contact strip material you may want to check around at a contract manufacturer shop or cable house. They often have crimping machines that use contact strips like that and may be willing to hand over the left over strips. An alternative is to lurk around a surplus outlet - sometimes you can find long coils of surplus contacts for very low cost.

--

Michael Karas
Carousel Design Solutions
http://www.carousel-design.com

I don't have either, within a 100 mile range. The only so called 'surplus' place near me is mostly parts from scrapped machines that have sat in a leaking warehouse for 20 years or more, or was left outside for a decade before they parted it out. That's why I asked on here. I like the scrap strips because of the evenly spaced holes. I'd like to find an affordable crimper for those contacts, but the only one I've seen was a very expensive air powered machine. If I could get accurate, detailed drawings I would try to make my own dies. Then I could use a small air cylinder to make custom cables, instead of modifying stuff out of a barrel of scrap.

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but if you just need some wires,

-Lasse

--
There's Vector T107 from Digikey:

http://www.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?WT.z_header=search_go&lang=en&keywords=Vector%20T107&x=0&y=0&cur=USD

but it's kinda pricey, so Google "copper tape" for a huge number of
hits.

You might try

Yards and yards of connectors headers by the bucket full.

-regards pc

This would work. How close are these to a D-sub terminals, and does anyone think that one of those crimpers would work OK??

I want to use jacketed cable for a couple wiring harnesses. I already have a pile of pre crimped leads in various combinations, but I'll bookmark this for future use. I have over 1000 feet of long RS232 & Centronics printer cables to get rid of, so I might as well reuse the wire. That's a lot better than selling it to a recycler. :)

140 inches for $11.33 = 8.092 cents per inch. It would be cheaper to buy a strip of terminals, and throw them away.

Vector was always expensive. Good quality, but expensive.

Thank you. :)

I forgot about K&S Engineering hobby brass. I used to buy thin strips & angles for RF projects. They also have sheets of 36 gauge copper foil. I bought a lot of K&S stuff from a closed hobby shop about 12 years ago. Now to try & find it in the storage building. I know it's mostly thinwall round brass tubing, but there should be some other stuff left.

I can't find them on that website. They may not bother to list them, because of the small quantities on hand. Nothing comes up on Dupont or Berg, and the Molex they show as loose contacts. At least you tried. :)

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usually only one way to find out, that is trying it, but I think unless you build airplanes or something like that they would work just fine

-Lasse

I would probably use less than 250 contacts per year, and all for personal use. I have a good D-sub crimper, so I bought some Dupont contacts on Ebay to see if they will work. The crimp pattern is similar, and about the same size.

If you don't need the holes, hobby stores have sheet copper. Shear it in whatever strip width you want. If you can stand higher resistance, brass works too. #12 copper wire and a couple of rollers to mash it flat, sheet metal roller.

Copper tape works pretty well too, but you have to put some other tape underneath it or it tends to short to the ground plane. I usually just use strips of FR4 cut with aviation shears, straightened out by eyeball, and attached with cyanoacrylate. (Gorilla brand cyanoacrylate seems to last a long time in the bottle, and works fine.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510
845-480-2058

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

I like to use bare bus wire. Clamp one end of a length in a vise and grab the other end with vise grips. Pull until you feel it yield a little, and then cut it into foot-long chunks for use. The pulling makes it super straight, really nice looking. It should in theory wreck the conductivity, but not enough for me to be able to measure.

We have two metal shears. I'm only allowed to use the old one on FR4, but it does slice up nice strips for use as bus bar on FR4 breadboards. I can cut you a batch. I keep a baggie of random-sized squares of double-side-copper FR4 for breadboarding.

I like these kinds of breadboards, because I can write on them and keep them around for future reference. And because you can do GHz stuff like this. And use surface-mount parts.

Ebay has lots of copperclad in various thicknesses. And copper and kapton tape.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com   

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom timing and laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

I did something like that on a recent project. Needed consistent temperature, so I used a 0.02" thick copper plate as substrate and mounted everything off that.

Of course, it's such a good heatsink as to be unsolderable, so I attached power devices and a working surface in a single reflow operation (sometimes, it's handy to have the kitchen to yourself!).

Since the substrate was unsolderable, and I wanted to build this dead-bug style, I attached a piece of copper clad to the substrate. So the PCB's entire backside was soldered to the substrate. The top side was much more easily soldered to.

Surprisingly, the top side is still a good heatsink, even with 1mm of FR4 to the substrate.

Tim

--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms

I have a full box of very thin single sided epoxy blanks, but I can't get to them until I replace the door on my shed. Plus, I will have to remove about a ton of parts to get to the shelves. These boards have no power or ground planes to short out, they are just cheap proto boards like these:

a

You can use this perforated copper strip from Vector, but it's very = costly=20 and apparently is only sold in packs of 100 pieces, 14" long (for a bit = over=20 $100):

This might help:

Here is a source of various copper shapes that might be useful:

s_wire_rods

And here is a great source of all things copper, including adhesive = copper=20 foil strips and tape:

-tape.html

Paul=20

I got a strip of 150 terminals, (37.5") for $3.05