NAALOX grease instead of gold kit connector upgrade? Preventative?

I've used Stabilant with excellent results. I think it may be a more appropriate product than what you are suggesting.

 

What people fail to understand is while S22 is about as good as it gets but it and Naalox is a failure waiting to happen. What people also fail to understand is that electricians are tradesmen and they just follow "code" and have no idea why. A professional knows why something is done a certain way and also knows when and why and under what conditions you can depart from conventional wisdom. So to answer your question the reason why S22 and Naalox and all the rest including deoxit are not currently recommended for our use is because our sealed connectors are NOT sealed. Take apart any connector in your car and there will be dirt in there. Dirt mixes with contact enhancers and hold more dirt and the connections fail in short order. We have been all through that in the 90's. We were taking apart connectors and cleaning and applying S22 every 6 months! We have evolved beyond that, replacing connectors and pins as the only way to refresh contacts for the long term. Thus you have all the controversy of the tin vs. gold pin etc etc. and all the rest not to be rehashed here. Because the electrician is basically a "code" follower he does not realize that the naalox coded wire nuts basically are sealed inside an electrical box where there is no vibration, minimal temperature change, and minimum dirt.

 

+1

I have seen electronic systems rendered scrap by use of contact lubricant.
These lubricants cannot possibly "enhance conductivity" because they are insulators. They can prevent corrosion but at the actual point of contact if the lubricant is not displaced, the contact resistance will be increased.
On older connectors the contact pressure may well not be enough to displace the lubricant.

 

IMO, it depends on the application -- for a well-isolated, single, high-current connection (like a battery post or the huge 2-spade connector bringing power to the TR fuse-relay panel or the multi-spaded power distribution block behind the relay panel of a 308) using a metal-filled contact enhancer is A-OK (I presently use a copper-filled type whose brand name escapes me at the moment). Using a metal-filled contact enhancer on a ~50-pin fine-pitch Motronic ECU connector = insanity.

 

FBB's comments about our connections NOT being sealed caused me to ask: "What should I do, if anything, to maximize the effectiveness of my Gold Pin Connector Kit?"

Stated differently: unsealed connectors will let dirt in, I see that is probably inevitable.
What can/should be done to minimize the deleterious effects of this?

Should the connectors be left undisturbed, or cleaned periodically?

 

No single answer there. It depends on the operating environment. I have a 360 here now with a host of problems. It has obviously been driven on salty roads and even the modern sealed connectors on the top of the motor in a pretty well sealed off environment have so much corrosion and build up, it required prying off the plugs. Rust never sleeps and as far as I am concerned any car operated in such conditions should be considered a throw away every few years. It is lunacy in my opinion to drive any car you care about in those conditions.

On the West Coast, even right on the ocean where I spent over 40 years working on cars we had near zero environmentally caused electrical issues. My routine was limited to removing and spraying contact cleaner on easily accessed connectors during big services and we simply had no connectivity issues beyond engineering related failures as is seen in the TR relay panels as an example.




Electrical components and especially harnesses are an expensive item in the construction of a car and all the manufacturers have worked to reduce costs in that area with the result being some longevity issues. Between the TR and the 512, the 328 and the 348 and the Mondial 3.2 and the Mondial t, Ferrari changed suppliers for their harnesses. We have seen more longevity related issues because of wire gauge reduction, wire insulation breakdown and reduced size of wire ends. When any condition exists to stress the electrical system, either environmentally, heat or age, those cars have had a greater incidence of problems.

 

I have a 1990 Mondial T.
When I got the car 4 years ago it had some connector issues.
I disconnected all the connectors I could get to easily.
I sprayed DeOxit 5 and cleaned all the male and female connectors with a miniature brush. The brush is usually used to clean between your teeth. I believe it is called a Proxabrush, you can get them at drug stores. I also used a small piece of fine Scotch abrasive pad for the male lug connectors.
After cleaning I wiped or used compressed air to remove the DeOxit and re-cleaned with 99.99% alcohol and fresh brushes/pads.
Then I used a high pressure hair drier to evaporate the alcohol and blow anything left, away.
I re-connected all terminations. Any connectors that felt "soft" or not making a firm connection; I squeezed the female connections just a bit with long nose pliers or other crimping tools I have.
4 years later and no issues from those connections. I wish I could say the same for the ones I couldn't get to. Oh and those lousy ground connections everywhere. Another thing to address.
Ask me again in a few years about the connections I cleaned, lets see what happens.

DavidJ

 

I've had nothing less than miraculous results using Deoxit Gold (CAIG DeoxIT GOLD G100L-2DB Brush Bottle 7.4 ml). It claims to convert corrosion into conducting material, which seems like "informercial grade" hype, but in my experience it really works well and better than anything else.

Logitech used to have charging cradle issues in their mice and Harmony remotes. Nothing (eraser, contact cleaner, alcohol) would work to make them charge reliably without fiddling a lot on the cradle, but Deoxit fixed it permanently. I had the same results with a 50 year old Fiamm horn relay that was no longer working, used Deoxit between the contacts and did use any abrasion and it fixed it permanently.

Dioxit isn't a paste, but it leaves a very light oil so it doesn't attract/hold dirt as much as a paste would. It's not cheap, but it works really well. Tons of success stories with Deoxit being a very permanent fix for old items and I use it routinely as preventative maintenance on any new connections.

 

This right here is it, the only way to insure the longest life span and close to perfect operation is to utilize environmentally sealed connectors of at least aerospace spec or better and over-sized wire gauge for transient spikes in voltage and amperage draw. However the cost of doing that at the mfg level would be astronomical and basically pointless.

Just like connectors all wire is not the same, metallurgy and insulation materials all vary in quality and type depending on use, even down to the stranded braiding and wire count, lots of science behind wire type and it's use. This is more important to modern vehicles running digital and high frequency signals.

This also brings up another thing most don't think of, a wire does indeed 'wear' overtime esp stranded wire that carries high frequencies. Between degradation of the insulation due to simple out gassing over time and environmental conditions, the current signal running over the wire also induces fatigue in the wire thru thermal and magnetic stresses over time, the higher the amperage or voltage or combination thereof the faster and more likely that wire will have a shorter life span. One of the reasons why we replace spark plug wires on vehicles with them so frequently. It's also why ground straps and wires degrade so quickly, they are the junction for the entire system, I'll avoid going thru KVL, KCL (Kirchoff circuit and current laws) of lumped element models. My point is the wiring in anything from a toaster to the space station is more then just about getting voltage from A to B. Heck we haven't even touched on induced voltages or "cross" signals. So after tackling the easy to see visual problem of the connector one is still left with the wire itself.

 

There were a couple of models of Mercedes a number of years ago that in their zeal to produce a low cost wiring harness used reclaimed wire. According to a source at Mercedes they used a chemical bath to clean the wire prior to insulating it and failed to complete the rinsing process. The copper corroded inside the insulation. I understand you could dig deep in the harness and bare the wires to see green, decomposing copper.

Mercedes paid to replace a lot of harnesses.

If people think the desire to cut those costs are limited to minor manufacturers or cheap cars......think again.

 

Imo every company has seconds. I think bosch has seconds and sells them to ferrari. Or the speced bosch product just can't take prolonged 250 degree underhood ferrari temps. When you pull an old bmw bosch connector off it is clean inside and even difficult to remove. A ferrari conector will almost fall off if you look at it hard. I think the best way to handle those with SRI gold kits is to do as the inventor recommended which is to connect and leave alone. The kit was not designed to need routine maintenance. That said knowing what I know now if I had a bad gold connection I would replace it rather than clean and reassemble. Good contacts are about making good physical connection. I pin tin or gold not doing its job is out of factory spec. You can't clean or bend an old pin back to factory spec.. you can however buy time.

I'm not sure where the next timebomb is with our wiring but what others have illuded to reguarding wire quality is on the mark. During gold kit install I have stripped back some nasty insulation 6 inches still finding copper green goo on copper wires. You can only chase so far.

 

When (raw & secondary market) copper prices starting going sky high several years back, skimping on copper volume and sourcing equated to fairly big $$$ savings for nearly every component manufacturer --- car makers included.

Everyone was looking to reduce on copper usage...... some of them got a bit too greedy and sacrificed performance robustness for cost reduction. When the bean counters dominate such decisions, the Engineering always suffers.

 

Exactly

 

What about marine wire for boats? Someone told me it was tin coated? On the cost of copper. A few years ago there was a big TA DO about OEM going to 42 volts DC. and use ribbon cable to reduce copper wire costs? What happened with that concept? The new autos with complicated computer controls, If you loose 1/2 volt because of poor contact your computer goes nutty. I believe the sensors operate on 0 to 5 volts.

 

It was headed to be an industry standard and a date for industry implementation was set. It came and went some time ago. Good idea in many ways and some components were going to be much less costly but as the program moved along it was discovered many small components, switches, relays etc were going to have to be substantially upgraded and it looked like the overall cost was going to be much higher. Then all of a sudden the entire industry sat on their hands and it has pretty well died.

Until and unless it can be proven to be less expensive I expect it to stay dead. That is the overriding factor for all the decisions.

 

It depends on the application though as Steve mentioned earlier. On a charging cradle its a high-current application and does not matter if the contact has a little resistance. Ditto horn relay.
On a car, on connections such as oxygen sensors, ABS sensors, crank sensors etc it does matter.
These are low-voltage low-current connections and any small additional contact resistance will have a detrimental effect.

On the general subject of wiring harnesses, many these days use aluminium alloy to reduce high cost of copper, that should be fun in a few years time...

 

Deoxit doesn't add resistance at all. It's made for connections like microphone connectors that have very, very low signal levels. The light lubricant reduces metal-on-metal abrasion when putting connectors together or taking them apart so there is less metal wear on the connector surfaces. Deoxit removes oxidation and corrosion when first applied, and it conditions the metal so that it keeps resistance low over time as compared to either pure cleaners or no treatment.

http://store.caig.com/core/media/media.nl?id=789&c=ACCT113328&h=44c9df3c33d3af831119&whence=http://store.caig.com/core/media/media.nl?

http://store.caig.com/core/media/media.nl?id=791&c=ACCT113328&h=2d7fb884b2017a7cda2d&whence=

Comparison to other products (including Stabilant): http://store.caig.com/core/media/media.nl?id=797&c=ACCT113328&h=4203ded2dc8d26ae73a6&whence=

 

Clean the connector thoroughly,apply dielectric grease. No problem. Cheap, Works.

 

Grease absorbs water.
NG.
DavidJ

 

dielectric grease is silicone based, non hygroscopic.

 

OMG!

 

FBB, for once I have to agree with you. OMG.

 

Oxidation Management Group support meetings,

Is there free coffee & doughnuts?