Small wires Help Please

My question regards the ever-more-popular very small wires in our lives. I never got the memo on how to deal with them.

For example, I have in hand a six-foot instrument cable (for an antenna splitter) containing seven wires of 22GA or smaller. Red and black will travel four feet to get to the panel. VArious NMEA wires only travel half that distance. Now what?

Maybe there's a tool I don't own (yet) to strip the entire cable sheath without damaging these tiny wires. Certainly can't strip the sheath by hand without nicking the wires.

If I do strip the sheath off the cable, I'll have seven six-foot-long 22GA wires. Run those through bulkheads to fight for space with the wires already there?

Doesn't seem right. Not robust. Do they even make wire hangers for 22GA?

Or are we supposed to just cut the sheath off short and butt-connect 16GA to each tiny strand, for a bigger wire? 16GA is the "minimum" the manu recommends when "extending" its tiny comm/power wires.

In which case, why give me six feet of it?

What am I missing here? Do you strip bundled 22GA? Should you?

Do I need some dedicated miniature-wire connector/terminal block?

Thanks--this ain't in Nigel Calder.

Sometimes it is safer to split the outer sheath longitudinally than to peel it away. The other option is to gamble that one of the cable-stripping tools that you have on hand might be just the right size. (It rarely is, but sometimes I try on a bit of the end.) Generally I try to take all of the wires in those cables to a nearby terminal strip. If something (e.g. the power leads) has to travel a long way, or in a different direction, I'd rather have heavier wires running back to the panel. After all, something else will come along that can share that power spot. (e.g. my antenna splitter shares its circuit that way with the AIS unit and the NMEA/Sealtalk converter. All of my cockpit Seatalk instruments share a terminal strip that way, although an extra inline fuse was needed to protect the tiny wires vs the big one headed to the auto-tiller)

There are crimp-on connectors for those wires - but they are hard to find out in the boondocks and will need their own dedicated crimping tool, of course :rolleyes_d:. You didn't hear it from me, but sometimes you can fold the stripped end back over the unstripped part of itself to thicken it up enough for the next-larger crimp-on. I believe that's what I did to get the antenna-splitter and similar wires attached to terminal strips. However, in some cases with many very small wires (e.g. the radar cable) I resorted to using western-union splices tinned with a drop of solder. This seemed more secure to me than those squirrely butt-connectors.

To get the tiny wires into a screw-clamp terminal strip, you need what is called a crimp-on wire ferrule that thickens and stiffens it up enough to hold in the clamp. There are pics of some in a recent blog post I wrote that is still awaiting approval I guess. I looked into buying some, but an assortment of the appropriate size ferrules, along with (of course) the dedicated crimping tool, runs somewhere between $250 and $500 :0. So I ended up just tinning the end with solder and clamping it down. I suspect that it will come back to haunt me one of these days.

Thanks. I am digesting this for tomorrow's work. I think I'll add a terminal strip using the, uh, hints you suggest.

By the way, regarding the blog, I believe that in the post-hack move we bloggers lost our "non-moderated" status. To get published you probably just have to alert Sean with an email.

I ran into this issue trying to connect a GPS receiver (antenna) to my new VHS radio; the individual signal wires from the GPS receiver were tiny. I connected them to a terminal strip that also interfaced with the VHS. There is a tool that is used to crimp the appropriate male and female terminals to small wires for constructing D-Sub (like DB-9, etc.) connectors; I have actually used one in a former life. If I had the crimper, male and female terminals, the insertion tools and the D-Sub connector shells, it would probably have been a more reliable connection, but so far (about two years), the terminal strip has worked. I only have a few inches of the individual conductors between the stripped outer insulation of the GPS cable and the terminal strip; same on the VHS side.

Woo-hoo!!! Just discovered that I can now edit posts from my iPhone! Sorry for my digression, but several years of frustration has just ended!

I begin to get it, after wiki-ing Mark's D-sub reference. Apparently, in small-wire world we pass beyond the realm of basic yacht electrical systems into the modern vale of computer connections.

One sentence in Wiipedia does suggest at least a name for boatowner compromises.
"Wire wrap connections are made by wrapping solid wire around a square post with a wire wrap tool. This type of connection was traditionally used in prototyping."

"Prototyping"--that sounds rather inventive.

Actually, I'm going to try to heat shrink 22GA ring terminals onto these computer wires for attachement to a connector strip. We'll see....

Maine Sail really needs to get into this and show everyone The Way.

Good luck with that. I haven't found any heat shrink tube that will fit over the standard crimp terminals and also seal around small-gauge wires. Actually I do have some of the proper-sized crimp-on ring terminals from Radio Shack, and you can get very small heat-shrink over them, but they are not tinned copper. You crimp them on with needle-nose pliers. Without looking, I can't remember which compromise I made on that boat installation. (There are also some made for bell wire with little spikes that penetrate the insulation, - i.e. you don't strip the wire - but I don't trust those at all.)

If you have a couple of weeks to wait for UPS deliveries and cash to throw at it, I'm sure you can find a perfect solution that will serve again in the future. If you need to get the job done this weekend, with supplies available in a small blue-collar town - well, more "inventiveness" may be required.

This can be done, but the cost in tools and parts might be prohibitive if you are only doing a single installation. This is what you would need:



http://www.bandc.biz/dynonefisinstallationkit.aspx

The little red and white thing inserts/removes the crimped-on pins and barrels into the back of the D-sub connector.

Then you would need a back shell for the D-sub connector:



http://www.l-com.com/d-sub-waterproof-d-sub-backshell-kit-db9m

This is a waterproof DB9M connector. Get a DB9F (female) connector for the other side to connect your two pieces of equipment together.

I believe I had success today. The high-class terminal rings from Defender ("Clear Seal", about $15 for 25) did seem to shrink to a good bond, and I put in a terminal strip just for the 12v splitter and Watchmate AIS.

I've been working on this panel job all week, and I'm maybe half finished. As you know who've done it, it's kind of a bear. One great discovery: chewing gum on the end of a screwdriver.

Back to it all weekend.

speaking of small wires. there was a vendor at the Annapolis sailboat show that had a wire stripper that would do wires of all sizes, multiple wires at the same time, strips in the middle and seemed to do a good job of it. The poor guy had the misfortune of being the first booth we passed after we came in the gate, otherwise we might have spent a bit more time with him. I had meant to follow back around but ended up running out of time.

I've been looking for more information on the thing since then but I can't figure out what the tool was called or who sells it. The US Sailboat show website map isn't quite detailed enough to figure out what vendor was in what booth.

Any body know what that would be?