Welcome makers.
Today I am sharing some experience
that I've had with open barrel connectors.
Now, if you've ever used some connectors like these,
which have these red, blue, yellow, I think is the other color.
They're a hard plastic and a barrel connector that you crimp down.
And then at some point you can then use this to attach to a screw terminal.
I've been using these for years.
I've never really liked them.
And they've been really a point of frustration
in a lot of wiring that I do here in the shop.
And if you've ever used these before, you know what I'm talking about.
They're very difficult to use.
A lot of times they come with a really bad crimper like this.
They're often blister packed at stores like big box stores.
If you go online, you can get
a slightly different variation of these where they've got
the shrink wrap connector on the end of these.
But on the inside, it's that same barrel connector.
And you might use something like this that is a ratcheting connector
and allows you to get old enough pressure on these sort of connectors
in order to really crimp down on the Beryl Jack Connector.
But even with those, I find that unless you're using a larger
gauge wire, it's really a hit and miss situation.
Sometimes you can get a really good crimp on there and you get lucky with it.
Other times you find that you crimp them on there and they fall off.
I've hated this whole thing for years in the way that these Connectors work,
and I recently started using these open barrel connectors
when I was trying to solve a problem in attaching
a ring terminal to these banana jacks.
And I found that most of the common sizes are simple,
not small enough to work on things like a banana jack post.
So today what I'm going to be showing you is a way that you can use
open barrel connectors for your smaller gauge wire.
It's really handy for Maker Electronics.
And then I'm also going to be covering
some of the ways that I've been using shrink wrap to save myself time
in creating enclosures for electronics where the electronics
may be enclosed in something already or more or less just hidden.
And the problem is you just want to make sure
that the electronics themselves aren't shorting out.
So with all that said, let's get to work.
So let's
take a little closeup here of what I'm talking about.
So here we've got a banana, Jack,
and I'm using these in an upcoming project here.
And if I take probably the smallest
one out of this package
you can see here, I can probably make this work right.
It doesn't fit very well.
I would put the other nut on here and it's going to give me kind of a
okay connection. Right.
But the bigger problem is that this is 410 to 12 gauge wire.
You know, they do have smaller ones here.
So I could go down this route.
But again, they make these rings a little bit more universally sized,
which makes it a little more difficult to be able to find one
that's going to work for your smaller electronics projects.
So that was really the trouble I ran into.
Now, these are open barrel connectors.
And you can see here, really the primary difference is twofold.
So let's cut one of these open and I'll show you the details
here.
All right.
So you can see I've cut this one open here.
And the difference between these connectors is really pretty clear.
Now, here we have a closed barrel, Jack.
So the idea is that the wire goes in there and then,
you know, this sort of crimper here or maybe this one where it's got
a little bit more ability to crimp down on this has to crush.
And I mean, completely crushed this very thick
and heavy gauged barrel that's on here.
Now, if I would try to do this with those pliers, it's kind of tough.
It's not very easy.
These aren't really made for needle those pliers.
Neither really are these.
But if I'm a maker and I'm this is all I've got on
hand is a pair of Neal's pliers.
These become very difficult to use.
So that's why they started packaging these with these sort of connectors.
Now, this is a blue.
So if I've got this, it's still a lot of work to get this crushed.
And as you can see, even if I'm crushing that,
if I've got a thin 22 or,
you know, a higher odd wire,
it's unlikely that it's going to work very well there.
And I've done that numerous times before.
So I've got my shrimpers here.
And these are great shrimpers.
By the way, if you don't own a pair of these, I have a link in the description.
They're probably my favorite pair of shrimpers.
I saw a lot of other electronics YouTubers
have some of these and they really are great.
So we're just going to strip off a couple of millimeters here of wire.
And as you can see,
I can literally just slide this wire in and out of that hole.
So that was with some reasonable amount of crimping.
So everything is really being held on by this heat shrink.
And then you're getting kind of an
intermittent connection or a very poor connection here.
Now, yeah, that can all be solved with solder.
But there's a whole nother reason you don't want to use that.
These open barrel connectors are really easy to use.
The only drawback to them, really, is that they don't have an insulator.
So you've got to go back after the fact and add it insulator.
I've got these clear ones that I picked up and this is a brand that I really like.
The reason why I like this brand I'll have a link on the description
is largely because along with the heater in tubing,
there is an adhesive
that's lined on the inside of these, so it makes them watertight as well.
And you can get these in multiple colors just like you can anything else.
But what we're going to do here today is I'm just going to show you
how easy it is to make your own connector in only takes a moment.
And we're going to want to grab kind
of a small gauge of this tubing here.
You can cut this stuff in half with a razor blade,
you know,
clippers, whatever you got on hand, they cut really easily.
So it's really just a matter of
sliding or featuring tubing on first.
And you don't need a heat gun.
You can use a heat kind of course.
Lots of people use lighters.
Now, ultimately, you should use a connector or crimper like this.
These are engineering grade and one of the
people in our discord had
shown me that these are actually much easier to use
than these sort of cameras here.
I wasn't sure who was in the discord.
If a find your name, I'll put it on the video here.
But someone had recommended these clippers.
They are pretty expensive, but in my opinion, very worth it.
And you'll see why in a second. So
if you're going to
print these, all you've got to really do is
I like to flatten it out here so I get a good channel for it.
And then you just put your wire in there.
You have to crimp the wire and crimp
the insulation to make a good connection.
But let me show you how quickly and easily this works.
You put it in the hole there.
Give it a little squeeze and look at that connection.
It pushes down from the inside, connects those.
And this is a really solid connection.
All by itself.
And then all you've got to do for the top insulation, same thing,
you get a very similar connection, but that is
solid, that is not coming apart at all.
It's holding on and giving you a good, firm connection.
Then all we have to do take our heat gun.
Hit this with a little heat.
I like just using gravity to hold that in place over that connector.
All right.
So here we have a now a frustration free connection, and that is that strong.
I literally am having difficulty pulling that out.
Now, a slightly less stronger connection,
but one that's still relatively frustration free.
So let's put our heat drink on
and we're going to grab
one of these connectors as well.
Grab my, you know, those pliers.
And I like to do the tab. Fold on these.
So you get the wire in there.
Fold over that first tab
and then come across.
Crimp it down with the second tab.
Now, this is a strong.
But if I pull hard enough, this will come apart.
But it is making a good, solid connection.
And then you can crimp this side as well.
Still a very, very strong connection compared to some of these other
connectors.
And then we just hit this with the heat gun as well.
All right.
So these are really solid, really like these connections.
And to me, this is far superior than one of these.
It works for smaller electronics really, really well.
You can put the
right on that stud here
and then we can put our nut on there.
And as you can see, this
looks like that connection belongs there.
This is a good, solid connection, getting me no problem
to this banana track.
So that is how these work, these open barrels are.
Now my new go to for a lot of things.
But I also want to show you these are these but connectors so.
But connectors are another thing that I think a lot of people struggle
with on here.
And I'll kind of show you the same type of thing.
So these are basically open barrel, but connectors
and these are far superior, in my opinion, to these as well.
So same thing.
I've got like 22 gauge wire here and it's got a very similar.
Not sure if you can really see that hole, but a very similar hole to the other one.
It's actually a little bit smaller.
So in theory, you're going to put two pieces of wire
in here, crimp down and hope it holds together.
These works so much better.
And I'm going to show you why.
So we can crimp down.
So I'm going to trim off
five millimeters on this wire right here.
And I'm going to show you,
look, we can put multiple wires
inside this connector and crimp this down.
So along with just being a port connector,
you can actually use this to splice your wires together as well.
So we had one simple connection, simple crimp.
There
insulation on this one's
a little bit hard because I just can't open that crimper
enough, but I'm not going to really care too much about that insulation
because we're also going to put one of these connectors on here.
So on these like two,
you can actually get a little bit of a bigger one on here as well.
So, so here
we've got this connection.
So with this, you can see we've now got the ability.
So I crimp that one side with the Clippers.
We can use those
shrimpers or we can use our nylon pliers the same way for these.
But connectors.
And then we'll grab that insulation to make sure
that it holds it in place
and then once again hit it with the heat gun and we're golden.
So these work great as well.
You can see I created another one of these here.
It's one of the ones that I just did with pliers you can use as a crimper as well.
But these are also waterproof connections which make this even more awesome.
And I really like these because it's able to get a good, solid connection
and I didn't have to break out a soldering iron towards these together
and, you know, solder them in maybe an enclosure or something else.
These work really well for tight spaces.
So I want to do one more thing here along the lines of shrink wrap,
and that's these bad boys here.
So these are large shrink wrap tubing.
And you may have
seen a lot of this kind of stuff used for batteries.
If you ever owned lipo battery, a lot of the light bulbs come
shrink wrap in that.
But what I've been using this for is enclosing
a lot of things like bulk converters.
So I was able to just simply take a tube of it.
This one is just not shrink wrapped.
Take that tubing slide in a bulk converter
and then with the heat gone, have it shrink it.
Now, this isn't waterproof, obviously, because this is wide open and I could
theoretically zip tie this or something, but I use this
so that way you can use this inside
of some sort of project without having to build an enclosure for it.
So this while, you know, showing off the electronics
to a particular project really does prevent it from incidental contact,
no wires going to be able to, you know, touch in here.
In short, anything out, which is usually my primary concern
when using this and some sort of other display.
But I just wanted to also share that tip because this was really
something that I've been
using a lot lately and it's worked out really well and it saves a ton of time.
I can throw something in there,
shrink wrap it, and a lot of these shrink wraps are very forgiving.
Most of the ones I showed you today are either 3
to 1 or 4 to 1. So
even even a tube that's fairly
large like this is going to shrink considerably
once it gets hit with a heat gun.
And, you know, as an example here, this is the same shrink wrap that I used here.
And you can see how much smaller this gets at the end.
So these are great for just simply shrink wrapping some electronics
and using them in your project.
So as you can see, these open barrel connectors are really easy to use.
You've got multiple options.
You can use one of these precision crimper or honestly,
the knife and almost pliers work really well for a very simple connection.
And the heat shrink really does
hold the wire on there so much better
than some of the hard connectors without the heat shrink.
And really, I love the way that it's easy enough
with heat shrink to simply enclose.
This is just a bulk converter here and I never have to worry about that
shorting out.
The other thing that I really, really liked out of all this was these
connectors versus the traditional board connectors.
They work really, really well.
You can take two different wires and connect them down to one.
So splicing wires together is a lot easier.
And to me this is a much more secure connection than
trying to get some solder in there and hopefully twisting them in a way.
And I know a lot of people have great videos on how to join a wire that way,
and I've been doing that for years as well.
I'll probably still continue to do that in some cases, but
for very quick connections that I want more or less permanent,
I may go this route in the future because I just find it very convenient
and easy to do.
So with that is going to be the end of today's video.
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We're going to be start doing some videos here with things
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I've been working with Dennis and John over there, really
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It's been kind of busy, but we're going to have
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