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You guys may have seen the ads on FB for some new-fangled butt splices that are supposed to make neat, heat-shrunk splices with just a wire stripper and a heat gun. I've made many a butt splice but they rarely come out pretty and if I solder them I worry about them being brittle (yes, I've had them fatigue and break). Bottom line - I decided to give these a try.
Here's what they look like out of the package (sorry it's a bit fuzzy but this is a close-up). Where the color is the ID is a bit smaller so I found it just a bit tricky to slide the wire past that area but not a big deal. The wires I splices had been a molded pair so it might have been easier if I'd trimmed off the little "fin" where the two wires had been connected.
And the completed joints. Very neat and tidy and a reading with my digital multimeter showed zero ohms across the joint so I'm declaring this to be a good connection. If I wasn't planning to do this write-up I would have added a piece of heat shrink tube to cover the connection just so the wires would be neater but left it off for photographic purposes.
As an experiment I cut one of the metal rings out of it's shrink tube and messed around with the heat gun and it's possible to destroy the metal part with heat gun level heat but it you just shrink the shrink tube the metal part gets hot enough to make the connection.
All in all a good system and I plan to use them as I do projects.
Here's what they look like out of the package (sorry it's a bit fuzzy but this is a close-up). Where the color is the ID is a bit smaller so I found it just a bit tricky to slide the wire past that area but not a big deal. The wires I splices had been a molded pair so it might have been easier if I'd trimmed off the little "fin" where the two wires had been connected.
And the completed joints. Very neat and tidy and a reading with my digital multimeter showed zero ohms across the joint so I'm declaring this to be a good connection. If I wasn't planning to do this write-up I would have added a piece of heat shrink tube to cover the connection just so the wires would be neater but left it off for photographic purposes.
As an experiment I cut one of the metal rings out of it's shrink tube and messed around with the heat gun and it's possible to destroy the metal part with heat gun level heat but it you just shrink the shrink tube the metal part gets hot enough to make the connection.
All in all a good system and I plan to use them as I do projects.
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