Hi, I'm Mark Call from Boat US Magazine and welcome to the workshop today i'm
going to show you how to make perfect electrical connections we don't need a
lot of tools i've got a pair of combination strippers crimpers here
these are the cheap kind if you're going to do much more than a few joints here
and there it's a good idea to invest in a pair of ratcheting crimpers makes it
better join and actually it's easier to use a pair of wire cutters in case I
need to cut some wire I've got a little blowtorch here and I'll show you how
that we use that in a second and then obviously we've got the cable itself so
I've got the cable here this is a 16 gauge cable it's worth mentioning that
cable as the number gets larger the cable gets smaller so 0 gauge cable is
so big and it's typically for the big fat connectors that you see to your
battery this is 16 gauge obviously it's law smaller and then when you go up to
24 gauge that would be the sort of cable that you would see attached to an LED
light or something that's not drawing much current anyway so as I said we're
using 16 gauge also here you'll notice that I've got a selection of connectors
you'll see here they've got yellow blue and red and that refers to the size of
crimp that you'll need yellow is the largest blue and then red so let's go
right ahead and show you how to make the joint
now I've already stripped back the cables on the end there just to save a
little bit of time this is the connector that we're going to be using as I said
this is a 16 gauge connector connector actually goes inside inside the plastic
and there's a little dimple there and that's where the conductor or the metal
part of the cable comes up to so ideally you want to strip back enough so that
when that goes in it comes up halfway through the connector and then this
shoulder of the insulation here comes up on the outside so there's no metal part
showing so first thing I'm going to do is to take the crimper and you'll see
there's blue there so I put that in the center one there and just go half way
first of all when you put that in and we squeeze until it will go no further and
then it will release and your see that has already formed a nice joint
on that end so we just turn it around and put in the other cable now you'll
notice that I'm using the red and black normally we'd never join these two
cables together the only reason I'm doing it is just to show you how we
would do this so this just for illustrative purposes only we crimped
that together so it won't go anymore comes apart and they've got a nice joint
there next thing we do is take the little blow torch that we mentioned
earlier now this is a heat shrink connector some of the connectors that
you'll see or you'll get will not have heat shrink built in they'll just have a
regular kind of straight connector and you'll need to cover it with a piece of
heat shrink this you cut two lengths with pair of pliers you slip it over the
cable obviously you slip it over the cable before you make the connection
slide it over and then you heat it with this little blowtorch and it will shrink
and it will give you a nice watertight perfectly good connection so I'm just
going to go ahead now and just heat this up gently you don't want to overheat
this and actually set something on fire so I'm keeping it moving and little by
little that will shrink around the cable and you'll see the color of the cable
comes through the insulation and that's it then you just let that cool down for
a minute and there we are we've got a perfect joint now so I hope you've
learned something here today for more you can go to BoatUS.com/Magazine
or check out our Youtube channel thanks for watching