On Tue, 08 May 2012 18:18:01 -0500, Peabody
wrote:

Thanks very much for the responses. I've made significant
progress.

I've cut away a lot of the rubber fitting that housed the cord
connection, so now I will be able to solder, or maybe splice with
some kind of clamp, the broken wire back to the cord. Here are the
before and after pics showing what I cut away, and what I have to
work with:

http://i50.tinypic.com/2mry2k1.jpg
http://i45.tinypic.com/35mhd02.jpg

It appeared the other two wires weren't far from breaking too, so I
just cut off the whole thing and will reattach all three wires.

So the issue at this point is - once I get the power cord soldered
and reattached - what do I use to re-seal everything - it is after
all a submersible pump. All the black stuff in the picture is
rubber-like material. The inner core is soft, and the outer part
is harder - like a hard rubber washer. I don't think something
like epoxy would work because I don't think it would adhere.

P&M becuase it's so long, but you should make it easier to figure out
what your email address is. Do the numbers between, or the ones
after, No and spam get removed or not? Or put instructions in your
sig.

Possibly, the best thing to use would be silicon tape. It's hard to
find, and not everyone calls it that. It looks like black vinyl
electric tape, but has a vinyl backing strip and a white plastic inner
spool, instead of the paper one on electric tape.

It's expensive, 7 or 9 dollars a roll, but well worth it for the
places it is especially suited. It performs like heat-shrink tubing,
but it isn't a tube, so it doesn't have to be slipped on, and if there
is something big on the end, like a plug or a pump, that's not a
problem. And it might be waterproof, when I don't think heat-shrink
would be.


Just yesterday I used it for the first time to wrap around a hole in
my garden hose. I used 5 inches of it, but 3 or 4 would have been
enough if I'd planned a little better. I'm not going to run the
water for 2 or 3 days, because though it goes on like tape, it
eventually turns into one blob, where you can't see the previous edges
of the tape.

You unroll 2 or 3 inches, get the start of the backing off (which is
difficutl. Maybe a knife blade would pry up the backing, instead of
my using my fingernail.) Then you hold the end in place while you
stretch the tape to about 3 or almost 3 times its original length and
wrap it around what ever you are taping. If you stretch it more than
3 times, it will break (You can tell when it has reached its limit of
stretching. Using the same amount of effort, it won't stretch any
more.) , but at 2 to 3 times, it pulls back after it is stretched, and
in doing so grabs onto the overlapping layers of tape and usually
whatever is being taped. I don't know if it will stick well to my
reinforced vinyl garden hose, but it might. I know it was the
perfect thing to use when a workman cut my phone wires, and I
solderied them, and taped them, and had to bury them. The phone
company said it was better than what they woudl have done. (Well
maybe that was the solder, since they use gel-filled crimp
connectors.)

Whatever I use has to adhere to (preferably) the outer hard-rubber
part of the fitting, and to the outer insulation of the cord, which
is also black rubber (I think - it doesn't look like plastic, but
not sure). Of course when I say "rubber" I assume it's synthetic
stuff - neoprene or whatever.

Once I get everything reattached, I'm going to wrap the cord around
the pump handle about five turns, so the cord will never move again
at all in this area. So the sealant can cure flexible or hard.

Actually, thinking about it, I could possibly seal just around the
solder connection of each individual wire and just let the water go
whereever else it wants to. Those wires just have normal
insulation on them, so I would need a sealant that would adhere to
that to keep water away from the bare wire.

Any suggestions for how to proceed at this point would be
appreciated.