will solder stick to the outside of BNC connector?

It probaly will but you may melt out the insulator first. Take a file and file off the plating unless it is silver to get to the brass for easier soldering.

I think these are silver plated. I did try one as an experiment. Using a 60 watt iron, I allowed the solder blob to stay in place both on the BNC and the surrounding surface. After a while, it seemed like the solder started sticking. Took about 5 min though and I believe the plastic inside of these is Teflon so no melting.

Solder will stick nicely to silver plating. But the heat required is significant.

Peter Wieck Melrose Park, PA

I suspect your connector looks more like this:

Yes, you can solder to the threads in order to get a ground connection. Most are silve or nickel plated. However, you might run into a bright chrome plated abomination that can't be soldered. Scraping it off won't work because the underlying metal is probably zinc instead of the more common brass. You mentioned that the insulator is Teflon, which is the mark of a quality connector, so I don't think you'll have the bright chome plating problem.

It will take a large chisel tip and preferably a temperature controlled iron to do a decent job of soldering. Try cleaning the threads with a brass wire brush and using some activated flux. I'm partial to 63/37 lead/tin, but the Rohs stuff will work at a slightly higher temperature.

Seems a bit expensive. If you need a few nuts, I have a fairly large collection. Sorry, no lock washers or lugs. I just hate thinking about you ruining a perfectly good BNC panel jack. Email to address below.

Correction. You can solder to nickel plating but only if you first remove the oxide layer with some acid flux and apply more heat: Be sure to clean/wash off the acid flux from the connector and wire when done.

It seems to me that the connector of your link is the insulated ground kind.Those were mainly used for coaxial Ethernet. On a normal one with PTFE insulation it is possible to solder. In a cheap Chinese TAP and DIE set I found one that was perfect. Very handy to replace F type connectors on SAT devices.

Be careful with PTFE and heat. It will start degrading at around 235 C, and will give off some nasty gases while doing so.

No problem. It was all done outdoors with the wind blowing everything away from me.

All four were soldered yesterday. Outdoors. I used a 60 watt iron. I initially tried a 230 watt gun, but I can never seem to get those to apply heat where it should be. I didn't solder the entire connector, just a couple of spots, more like a "spot solder".

In retrospect, I probably should have used some steel wool around the threads first and some flux. However, although it took quite a while to get the solder to stick, the job was done. If the chassis had been something other than tin and much thicker, I'd have simply drilled and tapped holes.

The problem with a soldering gun is that while it burns many more watts than a pencil style iron, the tip is rather small or rather less massive. What happens is the small gun tip will get hot enough to melt solder, but as soon as it touches something big, the BNC connector sucks away all the heat and the tip temperature soon drops below the point where it will melt solder. That's why I suggested a more massive tip and a temperature controlled iron. I'm really surprised that you were able to solder anything outdoors with the wind blowing. I used to do radio tower climbing and ocassionally had to do soldering. My iron of choice was a big heavy copper tip heated by a plumbers propane torch.

Nope. Notice that I suggested using a brass wire brush. Steel wool likes to leave tiny piece of steel imbedded in the metal. They're almost invisible but will make their presence known after they begin to rust.

You'll need a 3/8-32 tap wrench.

I'm really

Two things helped: what wind there was was very little and also it was more than 95F outside that day.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of this. I'll avoid steel wool for something like this in the future.

Thanks. I do have a tap and die set with the right sized ones. I don't use it often, but when I do it sure helps with certain situations.

On 7/8/2021 6:04 PM, Ruk wrote: ...

Well, you could have made nuts. Much less problematic than soldering.