Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been fitting a battery monitor. I’d have got my dealer to fit it but felt that I’d rather save a bit of cash and route the wires where they are completely out of sight rather than have trunking slapped along an upright somewhere.
The reason it’s taken me so long is that the cable between the monitor and the shunt is a 6wire twisted pair comms cable with RJ12 plugs at each end. Try, as I might, I was unable to feed the plug through the gaps available. It took about two days to get a small wire to follow the required route but anything much thicker just got stuck.
The supplied comms cable was long enough to reach halfway down a narrowboat, so I hit on the idea of cutting a length off and feeding the ‘loose’ end through the cabinetwork instead. That achieved, I simply added a new RJ12 connector and completed what I considered to be a fairly neat installation without any excess cable to hide.
To my dismay, the monitor did not work correctly (and no support from the manufacturer), so I then sourced a cable tester. The tester arrived and confirmed that the cable was faulty, so I replaced the plug I’d crimped to the cut end with another. Still no joy. After trying four times, my cable was becoming a lot shorter (wish I’d left more cable, now) but I still got a fault shown by the tester each time. I thought that the crimper may not have not ‘caught’ the flimsy wires properly but each of them would not pull out of their ‘faulty’ plug. The wires are multi-stranded, so I thought that, maybe, the pins had simply missed or made inadequate contact with a core, so I hit on the idea of soldering the original end back onto the cut one. So the reason for this post is to ask why that did not work either?
It shouldn’t be too difficult to match cables correctly and solder similar colour coding together, in spite of working in confined quarters, so I am left wondering how important it is to maintain the twist when joining such cables this way. I’m pretty sure that the joints are sound and that the supplied ends are not faulty, so what detail should I pay special attention to when joining two lengths?
Any suggestions?
The reason it’s taken me so long is that the cable between the monitor and the shunt is a 6wire twisted pair comms cable with RJ12 plugs at each end. Try, as I might, I was unable to feed the plug through the gaps available. It took about two days to get a small wire to follow the required route but anything much thicker just got stuck.
The supplied comms cable was long enough to reach halfway down a narrowboat, so I hit on the idea of cutting a length off and feeding the ‘loose’ end through the cabinetwork instead. That achieved, I simply added a new RJ12 connector and completed what I considered to be a fairly neat installation without any excess cable to hide.
To my dismay, the monitor did not work correctly (and no support from the manufacturer), so I then sourced a cable tester. The tester arrived and confirmed that the cable was faulty, so I replaced the plug I’d crimped to the cut end with another. Still no joy. After trying four times, my cable was becoming a lot shorter (wish I’d left more cable, now) but I still got a fault shown by the tester each time. I thought that the crimper may not have not ‘caught’ the flimsy wires properly but each of them would not pull out of their ‘faulty’ plug. The wires are multi-stranded, so I thought that, maybe, the pins had simply missed or made inadequate contact with a core, so I hit on the idea of soldering the original end back onto the cut one. So the reason for this post is to ask why that did not work either?
It shouldn’t be too difficult to match cables correctly and solder similar colour coding together, in spite of working in confined quarters, so I am left wondering how important it is to maintain the twist when joining such cables this way. I’m pretty sure that the joints are sound and that the supplied ends are not faulty, so what detail should I pay special attention to when joining two lengths?
Any suggestions?
