Many of the electrical paths in our products are power circuits connected with 12, 16, 18, 20 AWG wire.  Wires are sometimes soldered directly to thru holes on our PWBs.  This produces a connection using the least amount of board space, but the wires are subject to handling damage, with bird caging evident if the wires are flexed too often near the solder joint.  Finding inexpensive, small pin count, high current connectors that incorporate machined pin contacts with 50u Au (aerospace product with some flight critical applications) and don't use up board area is difficult.

Before Burndy was incorporated into FCI, they had a product that could be used to position and support wires entering into a PC board.  I'll call it a Wire Support.  It looked like a connector body without contacts installed.  It had a one way barbed feature inside each of its "contact" cavities so that you would slide a wire down into the body, it would be held in place by the barbs, and the stripped end of the wire would pass thru into the PWB hole, ready for soldering.  It was available in different position capacities, I think from 1 to 10 wires in a row and it snapped into the PWB with some peg features built into the molding. If someone out there has an old Burndy catalog you can probably find it, I think it was towards the back pages.

This item solved a lot of problems, in that it is cheap, took up the least amount of additional board area, pre-positioned the wire for wave soldering and provided a means of strain relief to protect that delicate area right above the solder joint.  I've contacted FCI and they say the product has long since been discontinued without replacement.

Does anyone know of a similar device or if some other company may have picked up production where Burndy left off.  Your help is appreciated.

Thanks,

Gregg


---------------------------------------------------
Technet Mail List provided as a service by IPC using LISTSERV 15.0
To unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in
the BODY (NOT the subject field): SIGNOFF Technet
To temporarily halt or (re-start) delivery of Technet send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet NOMAIL or (MAIL)
To receive ONE mailing per day of all the posts: send e-mail to [log in to unmask]: SET Technet Digest
Search the archives of previous posts at: http://listserv.ipc.org/archives
Please visit IPC web site http://www.ipc.org/contentpage.asp?Pageid=4.3.16 for additional information, or contact Keach Sasamori at [log in to unmask] or 847-615-7100 ext.2815
-----------------------------------------------------