Xt60 connector gauge1/23/2024 If you take a piece of cable and hold it between your hands, it forms a line with 180 degree angle. How Do You Characterise Cable Flexibility? My rough-and-ready minimum natural bend radius test rig. ![]() It deserved some thought, so I considered and rejected measuring the droop angle of a set length of cable under its own weight, wondered whether a test rig could be set up in which a horizontal cable could have weights attached to it, and finally arrived at something much simpler. Researching standard tests for cables reveals a surprise, they have a focus on safety and stress performance rather than its static physical properties, so while there are a host of fascinating tests to ensure that they don’t fail under repeated flexing or when being pinched, the standards don’t seem to include a simple measure of flexibility. Holding it in our hands, the less flexible cable requires more force to bend it than the flexible one. We can all tell by feel that one cable is more or less flexible than another. But merely saying that doesn’t give much information, I need some means of quantifying the flexibility of a cable. The first thing I did was plug it in and do some soldering, at which it was fine, and noticeably more flexible than the stock cable on my PSU. My build-a-cable project abruptly turned into a product test. I parted with some cash, and duly received a package containing a couple of their prototypes. ![]() They didn’t have any off-the-shelf connectors, but they could get their cable people to make up a custom extension using an extra-flexible PVC cable. And that was where this saga took an unexpected turn. I approached Toby Components, my go-to supplier for connectors who have helped me secure unobtanium in the past, to see whether they had any better options. Lumberg do one, but it tops out at too low a current rating for a soldering iron so I was rather stumped. ![]() For my cable I would have to find the longest plug I could, and it turned out that there are surprisingly few on the market. It requires an extraordinarily long reach of about 15mm, and the plugs on some laptop supplies won’t mate with it satisfactorily. The TS100 has a standard DC barrel jack, but surprisingly it’s rather an unusual one. I determined to find a solution, making a DC extension cable more flexible than that on my power supply. So to use it is to be constantly battling against its noticable lack of flexibility, a minor worry but one that I find irksome. Instead it relies on whatever cable comes on its power supply, which is frequently a laptop unit built with portable computing rather than soldering in mind. ![]() A high-grade iron will have an extra-flexible PVC or silicone cable, but the TS100 does not have a cable of its own. If the TS100 has a fault, it comes not from the iron itself but from its cable. Small, lightweight, powerful, and hackable, it has even spawned direct imitations. It redefined what could be expected from the decent end of the budget soldering iron spectrum when it came on the market, and it’s still the one to beat even after those years. By now, I must have had my Miniware TS100 soldering iron for nearly three years.
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