How to Make Battery Cables the Right Way and the Easy Way

today I'm going to show you my method of making your own cables something like this now if you've ever priced out cabling for inverters or battery applications or even automotive type applications you know that they're fairly expensive availability isn't all that great it's something difficult to get the correct ends that you want on each end of the cable and to get the correct length color and cable type gauge etc a lot of times the only practical solution is to make your own cables and I have a video I'll put a link somewhere on this video about how to select the right why your gauge for your application I'd highly recommend checking out that video there's not very many videos out there that accurately describe how to select the proper cable but I left out how to put the right terminations on the end now there are so many different types of terminations and such out there that it's not all that practical to add that to that cable video so I'm making my own video here and for this I'm simply going to put ring terminals on some cables that I have to make to make your own cables you obviously need two things you need cable and terminations in this case I have some to gauge cabling this is true to gauge I measured to make sure that it was true to gauge oftentimes it is not and that's important because if it's not it won't properly fit the terminations that you choose in this case I'm using these ring terminals let me do the pure copper ring terminals so let's go out to the garage and I'll show you my process for making cables on the bench I have the basic tools that I'm going to use for this task first of course got high have my cables and terminations have a something to remove the insulation you can use a wire stripper I find that standard utility knife works just fine something to cut the cables of course you could also use utility knife for that solder of some sort this is electronic solder I would recommend something that is thicker it contains more flux but regular solder some flux your propane torch I'm going to use a punch and a hammer that's somewhat optional and I'm going to use my bench vise with anvil to do the rest of the work the first thing to do is to cut your cable to length and the proper length for mine is about right here and just eyeballing it so I'll be ever cable it's time to strip some insulation off of each end this is the end that I just cut it's nice bright shiny copper as it should be this is the end that was exposed when I purchased this roll and you may notice that there is some oxidation on it I would always recommend to cut off the half-inch or so of the exposed end of the copper wire before you put your terminations on otherwise when you try to meet make these two together they won't necessarily make a low conduct or a high conductivity connection and it'll be difficult to solder also because there's corrosion in there now there's many different tools out there for stripping insulation off of cabling I prefer to just use a utility knife it works just fine if you're careful I don't make cables every day so I don't want to go out and buy a new tool for it I have one that works I'm just going to use this in terms of how much insulation to strip off you'll take your connection whatever it might be this happens to be this copper ring terminal put it on here and see how far up you need to strip it in this case I need to go at least up to here and I should go a little bit further also because you need to have some copper exposed behind the end of this barrel or otherwise you won't be able to put solder inside now that the installation has been removed and actually removed a little bit too much but that's alright next thing to do is to grab your flux this just happens to be some standard rosin flux that I have take your flux and dip your cable into it you don't need a lot just a little bit to help the solder flow and that's good Lux is actually acidic and you need to burn off all of the flux otherwise the copper will corrode over time that's extremely important so if you use too much flux you can actually get a joint that oxidizes over time so you don't want to use too much flux on this something like this is enough and now you can take your terminal and just slip that over the end and you can see that I have a little bit excess copper exposed there I stripped just a little bit too much off but again that's not all that important next I'm going to crimp the terminal onto the cable now they do make crimpers just for this application you hit them with the hammer set them on anvil hit it with a hammer and it crimps the cable I don't have one of those and the whole point of this is to save money so I'm not going to buy one just to make a couple of cables and you really don't need one anyway there's alternatives for example I have this bench vise and it's pretty good at squeezing things so I'm just going to put that in here and crimp it up this way you can also use vise grips that will give you a little bit cleaner crimp than what this does I usually use those but I'm going to try my bench vise this time I see no reason why it wouldn't work and there we go it's crimped on and I'm not sure if I could pull this off if I try it it's it's on there pretty tight but I don't really trust this connection at this point just having it crimped like this I do want it soldered so now I'm going to put the cable in my voice just something to hold it here and solder it up now when you get it with the torch you want to make sure that you only eat at the end of the ring if you heat the copper up here the copper oxidized don't want the copper to oxidize and as this warms up you may notice the green flame green flame is oxidized copper now if you oxidize the outside of this terminal ring that doesn't really affect anything you don't want the cable so now the solder should flow unto this joke I should be using a thicker thicker solder here then this little fence but this is what I have so would normally take this long if you have the appropriate solder butt I do not so takes a long time to feeding up in here it looks like we're getting close it looks like it's pretty well filled up I keep going so I'll let that cool and that is how I would recommend making cables it makes a nice solid connection both mechanically and electrically this particular one looks pretty ugly I didn't do the cleanest job on it but it is a good connection and that's how I'd recommend making them however I am NOT going to make them that way on my battery bank because I have at least 10 cables to make this is kind of a pain and I am lazy so I'm going to do it this way and this is very very quick and it makes a pretty good connection it is basically the same thing but not soldered so I'm going to quick show you how to make a cable like this again I wouldn't recommend it but it's good enough for what I'm doing and it may be good enough for you as well first thing to do is measure your cable I know that I need about 10 inches so I will measure out 10 inches and cut it easy enough next I need to strip the insulation off I'll do it just like before with a standard utility knife you don't need any special wire strippers just make sure that you don't go too deeply into the insulation otherwise you will end up cutting off strands of wires and the insulation will just separate just like that and you have a nice clean stripped wire that was also easy next we'll go over to my bench vise and take your ring terminal and put it into device from the bottom side up so that just the ring is sticking out the top I'm going to Center it in the vise just so I can get a good even eat good even pressure on it start it just so it doesn't slip out take your wire put it in here and squeeze it down and there you go you have a connection that is pretty solid but I have one more step that I like to do just to make sure that it's on there very well I'm going to use the anvil that's on the back of my vise a punch and a very big hammer there you go you have a connection that is not going to come loose you can bend it around sharp angles it doesn't pull out and it's fairly low resistance this isn't as good as excited connection but it took me all of about 45 seconds to do this I can make a cable in a minute in half and that's how I'm going to make mine it's very quick and after just 10 minutes or so I have this many cables made lesson isn't quite done yet but it's a pretty quick procedure to make these cables and those are two ways that you can make battery cables thanks for watching a couple of last thoughts before I go here these connections that have no solder in them have no protection against corrosion they will corrode eventually especially if you use them on a battery where you get gases corrosive gases coming out of the batteries these will corrode internally eventually and you'll get a higher resistance connection that may overheat and be a hazard so depending on the application this may or may not be the best idea if you add solder to it like I did here the solder will prevent it from corroding so this will last almost indefinitely you'll just have to clean corrosion from the outside for the connection sake to the battery post and you'll be fine so that may be one reason why you want to put solder in it get a thing that I did not mention was a lot of cables come with heat shrink and in general people will recommend you put heat shrink on but I do not like heat drink whatsoever because tell me by looking at this how do you know if the connection is in good condition how do you know if it's corroding how do you know if it's slipping out of the Crim it hides everything it hides all of the information that you need to know to know if this cable is safe the only reason to put heat-shrink on is for cosmetic reasons also you should not rely on heat shrink to insulate from contact if you have another cable over here that's a negative cable and you rely on this heat shrink it'll eventually rub through and it's likely to short out very dangerous so there really isn't any good reason to use heat shrink I don't like this stuff for cables like this it's good for cosmetic purposes if you're making cables for sale it'll hide a lot of manufacturing defects which is why you pretty much always see heat shrink on cables that you purchase because if they're crimp poorly you just don't know they overheat and well that's that so I just wanted to leave with those two parting thoughts but in any case this is just a little addendum but again thank you for watching

Channel: knurlgnar24

Views: 2,375,664

Rating: 3.4816353 out of 5

Keywords: Cable, Battery, Terminals, Solder, Crimp, Battery (Motorcycle Part), ring terminal, Do It Yourself (Website Category), Solar Energy (Industry)

Id: XkMdlPsBxkc

Length: 13min 46sec (826 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 04 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/AsMATTic]

I was needing to redo some ground wires and this gave me a good idea how to do it. Thank you!