How To Solder SquarePlugs

hey guys mason marangella here the rig doctor welcome to my workshop here in california today i'm here to show you how to properly solder square plugs we're going to go through their straight and pancake variety i'm going to show you my techniques so that you can get them operating as reliably as possible let's get into it my name is mason maringela i build rigs for the industry's top professionals now i'm teaching guitarists how to build rigs like the pros with diy tips easy mods and all the tricks of the trade i am the rig doctor today what i'm going to be working with is my exemplars are the sp400 and sp4 now these are the smaller diameter versions of the square plug so they're made for a smaller diameter cable that just means the thickness of the cable is smaller i'm going to be using today mogami 2314 this is a smaller diameter patch cable if you see something that says sp 500 or sp5 that's just for a larger diameter cable like a mogami 2319 and if you actually look at the spec sheet of any of the cables that you're considering using it will tell you what the outer diameter of that cable is and you can compare that to see whether that's going to be a match for an sp4 or sp400 or by contrast an sp500 or an sp5 which are just again the larger diameter versions of the exact same plug all other things are the same all the techniques i'm going to show you today are identical no matter which one of those plugs that you use whether it's the larger or smaller diameter so let's get into it first thing i want to do is i want to get some trays ready here right next to my iron the reason i want to get this ready is there's a lots of small screws and i don't want to lose the screws or the housings so i'm going to just dispose of them in something where i can find them at a later time i'm going to start first with my pancake side so what i'm going to do is i'm going to clamp this down in my vise i've got my square plug nicely clamped down there i'm going to get my soldering iron ready and i'm going to tin both of the lugs so got these nicely tinned that means i'm just kind of pre-soldering them getting them prepped and ready for the cable to come in next thing i'm going to do i'm going to grab my mogami 2314. going to strip i'm going to say about an inch off maybe a little bit more basically what i'm doing if you come in nice and close i'm basically looking to see that when the housing goes on that that outer insulator is going to get clamped in and is going to hold this tight because the enemy of any connection like this is lateral movement we don't want it moving side to side if i go down here and i clamp it i'm going to have a lot more wiggle room than if i clamp over the outer insulation like that so i want to make sure that if i'm clamped there i still have enough room to reach the tip and the sleeve and actually i'd say i'm a little bit short so i might want to just take off a tiny bit more just to make sure i have plenty just did a tiny bit more and now i'm going to braid this i just want to pre-measure to make sure that i'm looking good here it looks like i might be slightly long so i'm just going to cut off the little pieces i think a little bit too long okay perfect so this is about what i'm going to need and i'm just going to take off the slightest bit on the side that's going to go to the tip i need to expose very little of that because i want to keep as much of that clear insulation around it the idea is this is going to protect me from a short so i don't have any risk at all of for some reason the shield coming over touching against it and shorting it out so i'm going to do is i'm going to just tin these guys this is like a fancy word for saying i'm going to pre-solder them so now what i'm going to do i'm just going to start them right down on here i'm just going to heat up that tinned area that i already had i already got my center conductor going that's on the tip that's good i'm gonna solder the sleeve right now with the shield perfect that's laying in there perfectly come and take a look at that so i got them nice and soldered nice solder there is nice and shiny don't have any wires exposed if anything was sticking off beyond this i could always take my wire snips and cut that flush and i have all my outer insulator ready to go it's nicely in that groove it's going to give me some nice resistance once i come down to really hold it in tight so i'm just going to screw these back on so now i have very little movement in there it's not moving hardly at all because i have a nice clamp down on it it's putting enough pressure on the cable where it's not going to damage it but it's also going to eliminate as much lateral movement as possible that's how you do the sp 400 but let's go and solder the other side which is the sp4 the straight version so the thing you need to remember on this you always have to put on the housing first because if you forget this you're going to have to desolder the whole thing and start over again there's a little bit of a cover that's kind of buried in the inside i'll pull that out for you you want to make sure that that's on the inside too these are pretty small and will have a tendency to work themselves out next i'm going to clamp my straight connector into my vise i'm going to tin this as well and i'm not going to tin the bottom section as you can see here there's a little hole that's exposed in the bottom of the straight style connector i'm leaving that open because i'm actually going to feed through the shield through that because the issue with these is that the housing is so small that i can't really leave very much exposed cable at all if i want to make sure that i'm using the full benefits of the strain relief the other thing that i've done if you notice here from the side is i've actually bent down the tip slightly comparatively this is what a new one looks like where it's sticking straight out what i'm doing is i'm taking this and i'm bending it slightly down this is just to give me a nice angle when i go into solder you'll see that in a second now what i'm going to do is i'm going to strip off very little i'm doing less than a half inch here probably actually right about a half inch here i'm going to braid my wire so i'm going to tin this wire my shield and i'm actually going to feed it through i'm going to point this up so you can kind of see what i'm talking about now this is where the bending of the tip comes in handy because if i had to make this come all the way to the top if it were sticking straight out that angle would be too intense it would actually damage the cable so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to take the littlest teeniest tiny part of the outer insulation off i'm just going to tin it just a just a teeny tiny bit and what i'm trying to do is i'm trying to solder it to kind of the very top and what that did is it allowed me to still have all of the insulation around it's protecting it but it is not going to touch at all the sleeve i'm going to turn this over now i'm going to feed the sleeve through and bend it back because it's already tinned it's going to bend back very easily and it keeps the cable in its proper formation i'm going to take a little solder just come over the top with it bam perfect now you can see there's a little bit sticking off i'm going to take my wire snips cut that flush we now have a perfectly soldered cable you can see here perfectly the separation where you can see the shield is tied to the sleeve and the tip and the center conductor together they're not at all touching there's no stress on the cable and this is going to put as much of the outer diameter of the cable the rubberized part the plastic part exposed so that when i screw it together that i'm not screwing into raw cable i'm just screwing into the outside of the cable the outer diameter and it's holding it nice and taut it's restricting any pulling it's restricting any lateral movement and this is what a perfectly soldered square plug using either the sp4 or sp5 or the sp 400 or sp500 this is how you do it if you want to link to the materials that we used in order to do this check in the description below again these are square plugs and today i use mogami 2314. if i were going to do it with 2319 or other varieties of cable the rules stay the same you just need to check the diameter of the cable and compare that to the square plug that you want to use to make sure that it's compatible if you like what you saw today i highly recommend that you subscribe you give us a thumbs up and you write us a comment if you have a better technique for how you use solder square plugs i'd love to know about it this has been incredibly reliable for me that i've used on countless boards without any plug failures but i'm not opposed to hearing what you think it might be a better way in order to execute these sorts of plugs with whatever the cable of choice is so please do let us know that in the comments i also recommend that you hit the bell icon so you can stay up to date with all the new stuff that we have coming out we also have merch below if you want to buy some of the vertex t-shirts we have them available we also have a podcast if you're interested in hearing more of us we do interviews with rig builders artists guitarists all sorts of people in the music game and you can hear their takes their thoughts their rigs and it's a really really interesting conversation that we get to have on a weekly basis with a lot of the greats in the industry we also have a patreon page where you can work one-on-one with us getting specific coaching and consulting based on your needs so please do check that out if you're interested on getting some one-on-one time with the rigged doctor and our technicians until next time i'm mason marangella the rig doctor [Music] see [Music] you

Channel: Vertex Effects

Views: 57,130

Keywords: custom boards finland, square plugs, square plugs sp500, square plugs guitar, guitar soldering techniques, guitar soldering tips, guitar soldering 101, guitar cable, guitar cable repair, guitar cable shootout, mogami 2319 pedalboard, mogami 2314, Squareplugs, Square Plugs SP400, Square Plugs SP4, Square Plugs Pancake, Square Plugs Straight, diy guitar cable, solder guitar, solder guitar cable, rig doctor, mason marangella, vertex effects, george l cables, lava cables

Id: Z88EXSn9QY8

Length: 10min 42sec (642 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020