My old jumper pack battery clamps, resurrected

[SternWake]

I'd recently came back across them and figured I'd return them to some type of service.  I liked these as the contacts are well hidden by the plastic on the clamps.

They were quite dirty and oxidized.  The Jaws are copper clad steel, at least I think it is steel, Did not have a magnet handy, but definitely copper clad something.  Only one jaw was electrically live, So I ran 10 awg wire to the other Jaw as well, so at the minimum there is at least two points that  the jaws grab the battery post, likely 4 or maybe 8.

Here on the right, one can see the ground clamp.  Not so pretty.  The red clamp on the left started out in that condition.

The screws were holding the ring terminals to the jaws in the above photo, so I unscrewed them and decided to practice soldering something larger.  I used a dremel with wire wheel to clean the jaws better and used a wood dowel to hold the ring terminal tightly to the jaw.  lots of rubbing alcohol on a q tip, and then slathered it with flux, on the wood dowell too. 

I also recrimped the factory crimp with my hydraulic crimpers and covered the exposed stranding with solder too.

My 140 watt soldering gun was not powerful enough, I needed a small butane torch to get it hot enough for the solder to suck under the ring terminal.

The 10 awg was just the home depot 10-2 landscape lighting cable, so it was not the best choice in the flexibility or heat resistance departments.

But Mainly I was wanting to try out the dowel trick I read about. 

I put some 45 amp anderson powerpoles on these.  The cables seem a bit more than 10 awg, but certainly not 8awg. Perhaps 8 sae gauge or just whatever China felt like throwing on this jumper pack my dad gave me in 2001.

Anyway these clamps originally were on a small schumacher jumper pack that had a ub12120 AGM battery, 12AH.  I plan on using these clamps when I use my Meanwell  rpsp-500-15 as a portable charging source.  I have another set of clamps with 8awg and 45amp Powerpoles.  I could join them for a short set of jumper cables, but I would not use them to jump a car, well not quickly anyway.  Lots of cheapo jumper cables only have 10 or 8 awg wire, sometimes they are copper clad aluminum too.  I;d prefer to not melt the powerpoles trying to use them like regular jumper cables, but I would use them to parallel the batteries and transfer upto 45 amps for 10 or 15 minutes before trying to start the jumpee vehicle.  I have a 10 foot long 10 awg extension cord with 45 amp PP connectors, so I could have a weak pair of 'jumper cables' about 14 feet long.

Anyway, if you got a set of jumper cables, have a look where the wire joins the Jaw/ Clamp.  They might be poorly crimped or badly corroded and not work very well when needed.  If they are plastic clamps with just metal jaws to grab the battery post, see if there is a little cable hooking the Metal jaws together electrically.  The jaws are supposed to bite into the soft lead of battery terminals and make good contact, but more modern battery post clamps are harder metal and clamp jaws might only  achieve limited surface area resulting in a poor electrical connection

 

[blars]

There's a video on youtube of testing anderson powerpoles to destruction. IIRC the 45A ones melted at 550A, after the insulation on the wires did. The contacts still looked ok.

 

[SternWake]

Thanks Blars,
I found one youtube video saying the 45 amp powerpoles failed at 360 amps at 16 volts.  Well the housings  and 10awg wire melted, but the contacts were still together and unmelted.  Guess i should have more confidence in their ability to pass larger currents for a shorter timespan.  Mine do warm up passing 40 amps continuously from my meanwell power supply.



Many Years ago I started using the standard SAE 12v connector like these, but they had 10 awg wire, not 18 awg as shown:

I had removed the seriously weakened UB12120 battery from the jumperpack and tried to jumpstart a friends 3.8l V6 with a dead battery.  Soon as I hooked the 10awg  SAE connector together, it started smoking and melted together and I had to remove a clamp from the battery.  Not sure how many amps were flowing, but a set of 4awg jumper cables from this battery to dead battery right after would not start the engine, So I do not think many.

 

[MikeRuth]

It's an interesting thing to think about the Deans versus the Anderson PP. I believe both are very good connectors and used with in their ratings will serve well.

One thing I prefer in a way with the Deans is just the type of failure that was shown in that video. IE the wire heating to the point that the solder joint came apart. I have personally seen this happen. When I say prefer it is because with that failure the circuit is now open and hopefully now stopped self destructing.

Notice that the deans body was in excellent condition after the test. Again this is just my thoughts and certainly I fell both are excellent connectors.

Mike R