lucar instead of bullets

[JaneHibbert]

evening everybody. i havnt been on for a while, but am now starting on my car again as the weather gets better. A while ago I was given advice about electrical conections, and bought lucar conectors instead of cheap nasty spade types. But I still have a problem with bullet conectors, it is expensive to get everything needed to recreate bullet conections, and at the moment the wires are held together with heatshrink for the headlights, but id like to conect them with actual conectors for ease of changing / checking. Would lucar conectors, male to female with sleeves be okay do you think?

[bmcecosse]

I suppose so - as long as they are protected from wet spray. And well insulated from each other of course!

[Trickydicky]

Here are the original brass type,

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/BULLET-CONNEC ... 4ab6890619

[autolycus]

That's not a bad price, td, if that's roughly the mix you want. I usually pop into Autosparks, but that's because I'm only a couple of miles away.

The big advantage of bullets, apart from looking a bit neater, is that you can easily have a multiway setup, e.g. single cables for sidelights, main beam, dipped beam, and so on splitting for the two sides of the car.

I've still not quite convinced myself that the world would be that much better a place if I bought myself a ratchet crimper for bullets (like this ), so I use solder bullets with a soldering gun. You need a ratchet crimp tool (like this) to make a decent job of spade and ring terminals, imho.

I didn't follow the distinction between Lucar and "cheap nasty spade types" - afaik Joe Lucas himself no longer hand-crafts any of the ones you can buy.

Kevin

[beero]

Bullets and sleeves are not expensive and neither is a soldering iron and solder but you do need good wires in your loom, that is copper coloured not tarnished, to be able to solder them effectively. If you do not know how to solder then you may have more success with crimped terminals. All will make good connections and all will eventually fail if they get water in them and corrode.

[Trickydicky]

Hi,
Tarnishing on the copper wire is commonly known as "Black wire syndrome" here is a explanation. http://xternaldesign.com/blog/index.php ... ome?blog=8

When I flew R/C aircraft it is associated with nicad battery's. The only way to get rid was to replace the wiring as it is impossible to get a good soldered connection as the solder just forms lumps and does not run.

[GeordieDave]

I have both of the previously mentioned crimping tools and they make doing the job a lot quicker. I also have the tool for pushing the bullets into the connectors. I'm not bragging, but I might be persuaded to loan them out for a deposit?

The bullets can be done in seconds and there's no need to fiddle with a hot soldering iron in a dark corner of an engine bay. That reminds me, I need to buy a torch.

The only advantage over spade connectors is if you're going for the original look. Spades are no more water proof than bullets from what I've seen.