The important thing is to keep it tight and secure, in a way that there will be a permanent pressure over the connection.Īvoid electrical tape (except for extra insulation) as it will stretch under the pressure, and the whole thing will loose spring over a short period of time.You don’t think much about the power company until you flip the lights on and they don’t come on. Start taping straight to a fixed surface then over the springy thing while keeping pressure on it, and tight over where you started. Once the two pieces to connect are in place, put the springy thing over them (carefull to not create a connection with something else if you use aluminum). I've been in a lot of situations where i had to make an electrical connection but didn't have any solder, iron or proper connectors.Īfter years of McGyvering experience i can tell you YES, it is possible to use regular adhesive tape or duct tape.Īll you need is something springy like a piece of foam (from a chair or a cheap mattress, or a leftover of builder's foam), a piece of crumpled aluminium or regular paper, or a piece of carefully folded velvet toilet paper if you needed to be more precise. Real answer: Really, though, its a bad habit used by lazy people who need to improve their soldering techniques. But for roommate during crazy weekend? Eh, it works. Would you do that in a production unit to sell? I wouldn't do that even if my job didn't depend on it. The electrical tape was sufficiently sticky and the connections worked well enough that it survived two evenings of my roommate running around begging candy off of people (a fair amount of torture, IMHO), and still worked when it came back to the apartment. I used black electrical tape to connect resistor leads to wires in a custom Ghostbusters backpack. Technical answer: Depends how reliable your connection needs to be and the conditions its going to be in and length of time it needs to work. Or the device will be local to a person's skin, in which case you shouldn't use solder due to heavy metals which can affect a person's health.ģ: are they really substitutes or just bad habit? When you need to attach things together electrically and you can't solder. If the problem is concern about lead, there are lead-free solders that flow at somewhat higher temperatures but are not beyond hobby level tools. It provides a conductive, oxygen-excluding bond between even flat metal surfaces. These methods are more suited for old-school vacuum tube and relay technology.įor small scale semiconductors and low-wattage passives, you really can't beat solder. If you are joining wires, or components with wire leads, then wire nuts, crimp-on splices, or screw-down connections (like barrier strips) will work OK, but aren't really suitable for fiddly little items. Oxygen and humidity can generally still get into the joint, and these are what eventually will degrade the connection. If you have two wires that are well twisted together, covering the joint with heat shrink tubing or tape can insulate the otherwise bare metal and prevent shorts (essentially the same job as a 'wire nut'), but has no other advantage. For instance if I have soldered wires coming off a pcb i'll plop hot-glue or epoxy over the connection to glue the wire to the PCB and remove stress from the solder connection.Īdhesives aren't going to provide any electrical conductivity, and aren't likely to work well with metal surfaces since these don't tend to be very porous. I do use some of them as insulators though. I would never use any of these in place of solder. (Thanks Michael/Jeanne)ĭuct tape's core is a conductor, but the coating and glue on the tape is an insulator. its not doing the job of solder though, its not providing the electrical connection but rather just keeping it from coming unwrapped.Įvery type of epoxy i've used has been an insulator although there appear to be some that are conductive and may be useful in specific situations. i have heard of people using it to provide extra hold on wire wrap boards. Super glue (cyanoacrylate glue) is a good insulator. Hot-air-gunning, do you mean hot air soldering or maybe given the nature of the other things mentioned heat shrink tubing? Nothing you listed is a substitute for soldering, they are all things you can use for physical attachment or insulating but are not things to use for making an electrically conductive connection.
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