According to Michael A. Terrell :
"DoN. Nichols" wrote:

According to Michael A. Terrell :

The only genuine WE handset which I have nearby has the captive
cord instead of the modular connector cord, so I can't check there. But
IIRC, *all* handset cords have used that narrower connector.

It is a bit too late tonight, but I could photograph them both
side by side.


I use one of my flatbed scanners for small parts. Lay them on the
glass and cover it with a folded white tee shirt. Some samples are on
this page of my personal website:
http://home.earthlink.net/~mike.terrell/Ephar.html

My flatbed scanner is hooked to the token Windows box, and is a
pain to use (limited physical access among other things), and I don't
think that I even *have* a plain white tee shirt. (They don't have
pockets, and I use shirt pockets regularly. :-)

Also -- *any* size of the "Miniature Blue Ribbon" connectors by
Amphenol is now called "Centronics", simply because Centronics (the
printer manufacturer) selected that connector for the parallel interface
which they used. I find myself greatly frustrated by the use of the
term for the 50-pin connectors used for SCSI on many systems. (For the
50-pin, I prefer the locking connector made mostly by AMP and used on
the Suns before they went to fast wide SCSI with 68-pin connectors
replacing the 50-pin ones.


Some people also call the 24 pin version used for IEEE-488 (HPIB,
GPIB) "Centronics" as well. BTW, Google SCSI as "Small System Serial
Interface" and see how many idiots there are out there. ;-)

Yep! I wonder where some of these things come from.


The originals Sub-D connectors were made by Cinch.

Though Cannon was another common manufacturer of those. Each
had different designs of backshells -- some much worse than others.


Personally, I prefer the AMP one piece shell that folds over and has
a single screw to hold it together. I think I saw a couple hundred DB 25
hoods the other day at the local surplus metal dealer. I'll take a
notebook the next time to write down the AMP number.

The AMP ones also have a second screw (a long slotted setscrew),
in a square nut which drives the tapered Delrin block which serves as
the cable clamp. IIRC, some of the earlier ones had three screws,
instead of just one.


The ones with two pins fatter than the other two, so filament
fed through two, and the other two were grid and plate -- and the
filament served as the cathode as well? Or the ones where grid and
plate were separate connections through the walls of the tube?


Yes, it is black bakelite with a pair of "F"s , a "G" and a "P"
molded in. It is made to be screwed to a board, and top wired.

Interesting. *Those* I don't have -- though I have some octal
ones which were used mostly for relay sockets in industrial controllers.

Do you have any "loctal" sockets around still?

I got a new Jameco catalog in the mail today with the amp modular
plugs on page 115. they also have their ValuePro line with the 4P4C
connectors, but the picture stinks.

So it does.

They have the rather rare 10P10C connector as well.

I would like to get a crimper for those. I have an sBus card
for older Sun workstations which provides four serial ports through such
connectors -- though I really don't need the outer two pins -- they are
for carrying the signals for synchronous serial and asynchronous is all
that I need.


How hard would it be for you to machine the outer edges from one of
the 8P8C dies to make it wide enough?

IIRC, the overall width of the connector is the same. They have
simply taken some of the thick walls of the 8-pin version and added
another pair of slots for the blades -- and of course the internal guide
grooves for the wires under the blades.

They don't bother documenting the width for either those or the
8-pin connectors in that catalog page.

Certainly if the connector is wider, I won't have room to widen
the dies for my AMP crimper for the modular plugs -- and AMP/Tycho does
not sell dies for that crimper. But perhaps I could work with one of
the cheaper "pliers" crimpers for that purpose.

If you don't need the wires, you
don't have to worry about crimping those positions. Personally, I would
make my own dies for my 1 ton arbor press. I have severe Carpal Tunnel
Syndrome, so some hand tools are out of the question most days.

Then you would probably like my crimpers for 8 ga through 4/0
terminal lugs. It is a hydraulic head, with the choice of a hand-pump,
a foot pump (which I don't have), or an electrically-cycled pump. I'm
set for all of them except 4/0. I don't have those dies. There are two
heads -- one for 8 Ga through 2 Ga, and the other for 0 (1/0) through
4/0. I got the electrical pump first -- as part of a surplus sale when
I was after something else -- but once I saw it I realized what it was
and kept it.

For the smaller range (8 Ga through 2 Ga) there are other
self-contained hand-held and hand-pumped hydraulic crimpers -- but for
the 1/0 through 4/0, the head is always separate. I first *used* one of
those when I worked for Melpar back in the mid 1960s, and they had the
foot-pumped version at that time. This is why I recognized the
electrical pump when I got it. :-0

I used
custom dies with a 1/2 ton arbor press for crimping ribbon cable into
IDC sub-D connectors, and IC headers at Microdyne. We had 25 people who
made cables for production, but I preferred to make my own for test
fixtures, rather than spend a half hour explaining what i needed. A
quick and dirty guide for the pin side of the IC header connectors can
me made from a stack of three or four layers of phenolic or glass epoxy
perf board drilled in a .1" * .1" grid instead of drilling a metal
plate. A couple screws from the bottom of a scrap piece of 1'8"
aluminum plate allows you to replace the perf board when it wears out.
It has the advantage of fitting every version made with .1" spacing, and
will last for 500 to 1000 crimps if you don't abuse it.

Somewhere I still have a crimper made from a smaller arbor press
than the 1/2 ton one -- dies and guides which were semi-affordable. I
now have a really nice press by T&B Ansley which came from a hamfest.
Thank goodness I had a folding wheeled cart to carry it back to the car. :-)

If you look at the top right section of the page you
will see that there are two widths of 4P4C modular jacks available.
Since the handset doesn't connect to the telco, it doesn't need an
Registered Jack number. I can scan the wider plug for you, but not
tonight. I do my graphics work on another computer that's in the house,
and I'm working in one of my shops tonight.

http://www.jameco.com/Jameco/catalogs/c264/P115.pdf

Actually -- the top of that page shows two four-pin connectors,
but only one is a 4P4C. The other is marked as 6P4C. The 4P4C is
labeled with the descriptive word "handset", while the 6P4C is one of
two marked "RJ11". All three have WE numbers -- an Western Electric is
good enough to be Phone Company -- at least back in the old days. :-)


That is the left column labeled "Modular Plugs". The first two items
in the right hand column are the two different 4P4C jacks, and the
widths are .48" and .395". If you look, you will see that the narrower
version is more expensive, which suggests that it doesn't sell as well.

Yes -- but we were talking about the plugs, not the jacks.

In the plugs section, only the narrower one is called a "4P4C".
The wider one is called a "6P4C", and is given a WE part number of
"623", while the "4P4C" is given a WE part number of "616". Of course,
the "6P6C" is also given the WE part number of "623".

it seems that there is a bit of confusion between the
terminology of the plugs and the jacks. Measuring the width of my
example of a "4P4C", I come out with 0.298" (Probably 0.300" was the
target dimension.)

Note also that there are some other specialized ones which I
don't see here. There is a 6P6C which has the locking clip offset to
one side which is used as a serial port on DEC VT-320 terminals -- and I
think the VT-220 as well.

Amp makes a set of dies for my crimper to handle those too.

Hmm ... I'll have to look at what DD form I got when I retired
as a civilian employee of the Army.

[ ... ]

My sig file is there to remind a net stalker in Oregon that he hasn't
stopped my non profit work to collect, refurbish and give free working
computers to other low income & disabled Veterans in my area. The
DD2114 is your honorable discharge.

O.K. Though you seem to have either dropped a digit in the
..sig, or added one i the sentence above. (I suspect the latter, as most
DD forms which I encountered were three digit -- especially ones as
common as those.

[ ... ]

Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.

Enjoy,
DoN.
--
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