It is the square, hard pin that is the secret behind the good and reliable
connection of wire wrapped connections. You will not even get a close result if
you wrap a wire around a round pin. (Been there, done that, and that was tin
plated Cu wire on tin plated Cu pins.) You have the same mechanism with wire
nuts. Inside the nut is a spiral spring made of square wire. The sharp corners
will press themselves into the softer metal in the conductor and form a "gas
tight" connection.
I wonder if we can use wire nuts to make the connections to Al wires in
antennas. Simple and cheap. Any comments?
Hans - N2JFS
-----Original Message-----
From: Tod - ID <tod@k0to.us>
To: towertalk@contesting.com
Sent: Thu, Dec 30, 2010 11:40 am
Subject: [TowerTalk] Using aluminum wire [or aluminum clad wire]
One does not need to solder wire to assure good conductivity between two
pieces that are 'connected' together. Western Electric ran experiments in
the 'middle ages' of technology that showed wrapped joints would actually
have better conductivity than soldered joints. The result was that the
telephone switching centers had wire wrapped connections rather than
soldered connections. The technique had cost and simplicity advantages as
well. Many of our initial commercial computers had wire-wrapped backplanes.
The Western Electric experiments used copper, not aluminum and the pins that
were wrapped with wire were square in cross section, not round.
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