Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Cheap wire corroding

I boughr several spools of 12 and 14ga automotive type wire (stranded) and have had a bunch of gailures at the connections. I've tried solder and shrink type crimp on connectors with poor luck.

Where can a guy buy good ol copper wire like it was 1999 again?

Maybe buy marine wire? It's pre-tinned to fight corrosion, but it's spendy.

Use what you got wire wise, and just buy a tube of dielectric grease and use it liberally at your junction points. That will stop it unless you have a chlorine gas environment, like in a battery compartment on a salt water boat.

Use NO-OX-ID A-SPECIAL. It works better than anything else. Period. When used correctly, it stops all corrosion.

https://www.amazon.com/NO-OX-ID-Spe...amp;hvtargid=pla-1297861078935&psc=1

Junk the butt connectors they never grab right. Learn how make a good butt connection of the 2 stranded ends then direct solder, seal with heat shrink tubing. If you are actually getting corrosion failure instead of mechanical joint failure then this stuff is the ticket



Used this stuff on radio antennas connections to seal them. Bitch to get off.

You may want to wear a hazmat suit when using this stuff. It tends to get EVERYWHERE!

Heat shrink should be adhesive lined (3:1 minimum)

The 2:1 stuff is not adhesive lined.

Looks like a great preventive maintenance product, but not effective as a corrective measure. The description of its uses makes no mention of corrosion removal---just prevention.

I've tried de-ox and solder. It always fails at the edge of the connection with a white powder where wire was.

Could be the solder you're using. Can you show a link to the exact product? The de-ox, too.

Sounds like Never Seize. One dab and it will be in or on everything.


Clyde

This. Get tinned wire.

Copper on a boat turns green, tinned copper is way better because it turns gray/green...

Crimped terminals with the integral heat shrink aren't the only solution...there's a tradeoff between a decent crimp and electrical connection, and the hole you put in the heat shrink sleeve resulting from applying said good crimp.

Anymore I'm in the bare tinned terminal, electrical solder and black adhesive lined heat shrink camp for vehicles and boats. Get rosin-core solder meant for tinning electrical connections, and one of the pistol-shaped solder irons of healthy wattage. Also get a good set of crimps for bare terminals. It's easy to splice wire-to-wire or wire-to-tinned-terminal that way.

Any terminal block or other location of exposed wire and terminals on a boat gets painted with LPS-3 or CRC-400 after install. That helps a bunch. I stumbled into a gallon of LPS-3 locally for 12 bucks a few years back.

I started using dielectric grease on tune ups a couple years ago, now use it on everything. Good stuff

A few wraps of electrical tape first makes all the difference

When stranded wires are soldered some of the flux in the solder will wick up the strands under the insulation. Flux is made in many different formulations and some of them are not suitable for splicing wires because they remain chemically active and corrode the wire under the insulation over time. When you select solder for electrical/electronic work you're basically selecting the flux which is integral to the solder. Other than that, you select the tin/lead ratio which is less important...but I would recommend 63/37 for common electrical purposes. The flux type should be R0L0 for soldering wires.

Dielectric means non-conductive grease, use conductive grease and it will protect better.

What did you use it for? About all it's good for is spark plug and distributor boots.

I used NO-OX-ID for 20 years on battery backup systems, ground connections and battery connections. The NO-OX-ID we used was a thick grease that came in a tube. The battery backup systems lasted for many decades. It's a conductive grease and it will prevent all corrosion. I still use it today on my vehicles and on other electrical connections.