J
Jeff Liebermann
- Jan 1, 1970
- 0
Not too sure about that, that is semi-skilled labor intensive.
Agreed. It was difficult to automate. However, it replaced an
equally labor intensive crimping operation using a very noisy
Amp-o-lectric connector cruncher using various connectors like these:
<http://catalog.tycoelectronics.com/TE/bin/TE.Connect?C=10029&M=FEAT&P=10307&U=&BML=&LG=1&I=13&G=G>
The tinned coax was adequate, but the quality varied radically
depending on who was doing the tinning. After about 1.5 years of
trying to control an inherently tricky process, along with increasing
production requirements, we went back to the crimped connectors. We
never even tried to build a proper robot or outsource the coax cable
production. The final blow was when a quality consultant identified
such manual labor intensive processes as unacceptable. The PCB's and
test fixtures were designed to handle both connector types, so the
reversion was fairly painless.
Somewhat later, I proposed various fixtures, fixes, tweaks, and
improvements, that I thought might have saved the idea, but nobody was
interested.
Today, I suspect that I could automate the process. It really depends
on how quickly I could heat and tin the braid without generating a
large heat affected zone. With solid Teflon dielectric, that's
possible. With polyethylene, it's much more difficult. With foam,
forget it.