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I have a sneaking suspicion that my 50w soldering iron will not be able to cope with soldering 25mm sq cable. Its essentially alternator/starter motor cable like this...
I have access to a propane torch similar to this...
http://www.machinemart.co.uk/shop/product/details/fc109-gas-torch-with-nozzles/path/gas-torches-soldering-irons
...but I can't see how I would heat the cable and lugs enough to take the solder properly without making a mess of the cable insulation. I have some sections of heatshrink that I can use to tidy them up a bit but don't want to make too much of a mess.
Other option is to crimp the terminals onto the cable, but the crimping tool I've got is designed for Coax so hasn't got the right type of inserts (they are hexagonal so won't squash the terminal properly...even if it did I'm not sure it would be able to cope with the diameter of the cable.
i would say best not to... I knwo nothing about car electrics, but being an electrician, i'd say crimp it properly...
Hmmm...£60 for a crimping tool that can take that size of cable 🙁
There are hammer crimpers from the USA for £20 but apparently they don't make good connections when used with a hammer...says they can be squashed in a vice though which should be better.
Can't find any for sale over here though...
Use a blowtorch with a fine nozzle so that you can localize the heat, when I used to do this sort of work I would protect the insulation with several layers of fibreglass tape while the soldering was in progress.
You can hire a crimp tool for about £7. Mine goes up to 400mm
I use a cooks blow torch (like for creme bulee) for those type of jobs.
where are you, i can do it if your local. i bet if you went to any car garage and you have the wire and crimp ready they well do it for free!
i crimp up to 150mm2 cable with hydraulic battery crimpers at work!
I'm in East Sussex on the coast Slogo.
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i use these bad boys!
im also on the coast but dorset. go to a garage and get it done they shoudnt charge you!
Thanks Slogo.
crimp it - put a screwdriver across the back of the spade conenctor and whack it in a vice. Will make a solid connection. Witht hat much metal Im not sure you could even solder it - weld it perhaps!?
You [i]can[/i] solder a lot bigger than that (think 1000 sq mm) and the electricity industry used to do so regularly - was part of the standard training when I started.
But I wouldn't bother - crimping is a lot easier.
Exactly what you are looking for:
So, should I go for the soldering technique?
The alternative is I can hire a manual crimping tool for £20 a day from Speedyhire, but that means being organised and being ready to do all my crimping in one day...have to connect three batteries, an isolator switch, relay, couple of 80 amp fuses plus run the cables along the chassis and more terminating at the back of the van, so quite complex to cut all to length beforehand and cart it all to a garage.
we hire ours from our electrical supplier (newey and eyre) for our plating line (70mm cable) and is far easier than soldering, having said that for the odd cable connection we can solder (does help that we have big solder baths on site. to do it i normally flux the cable then tin the cable. put lug into a vice and fill with solder using a blow torch push in the tinned wire. The advantage we have found is the cable is less affected by corrosion at the join and the connection is more reliable. But for what you are doing just prep what you can then hire a hydraulic crimper, they are far better than the cheaper single point ones you get
Crimp it. If you have to solder it then don't move the cable around in the molten solder while it cools (like in the video). You can get cracks in the solder that way. Just hold it there till it cools