Hi All,

   A tuppence to offer?  As a person who has done a fair amount of
soldering of things electronic, I see that several contributors are
dancing around an issue that I see as an important consideration. 

   Everything else being equal (which it almost never is) soldered
and crimped joints have about the same overall durability. 
Properly soldered joints can be somewhat more resistant to a harsh
environment (e.g. a coastal airport).  They can also be somewhat
harder to diagnose when a connection goes high-resistance. 

   The larger issue, as I see it, is the learning curve.  It takes
a lot longer - with a lot more waste - to get consistently good
solder joints, than it does to get good crimped joints with a
high-quality crimping tool.  When I get to that point, I'm
investing in an appropriate crimping tool; it will be less
expensive than the time and re-works I'd have to put into a
soldered system.

Best Regards,
Dale R.

Charlie England wrote:

WRJJRS@aol.com wrote:

Charlie
This is one of those where people must agree to disagree. Get the proper crimpers, you need only buy them once. Far to many failures occur due to incidentals and ancillary systems. The milled pins or even the better rolled pins work with the crimper to form the best possible connection. The conductor is crimped in the pin and the insulator is captured by the "tails" of the pin forming a sort of strain relief. This isn't possible with the soldered pins regardless of how good your technique is. Even a perfect solder joint is more likely to break. We need solder joints on circuit boards but crimps are better for everything else. The US Navy now uses crimp connectors on everything. They can "afford" it of course at our expense. If you live in Florida or California's coastal area corrosion could be a factor. Any coastal area for that matter.
Bill Jepson

Having spent a lot of years repairing crimped connectors (built in a production environment in high dollar commercial products) with corrosion or stress riser broken wires, I can say with confidence that crimped connectors aren't immune to the problems attributed to soldered connections. I've repaired my share of 'cold' solder joints, too.

I'm just saying that neither is inherently superior to the other & neither is inherently more prone to failure from stress risers. The built-in strain relief in crimp connectors exists only in some specific brands & models of connectors. Without high quality connectors, tooling & training, crimped connections are failure prone due to both corrosion & stress risers.

Just a cautionary note that crimp isn't automatically 'quality'.