The power cord of our vacuum cleaner got caught in the brush bar a while back, which was enough to strip off the outer insulation. Annoyingly Vax don’t provide the power cord for this Vacuum as a spare part and the strain relief is moulded onto the cable, so I ended up 3D printing a replacement and buying some suitable standard flex. This should really be an available spare, but finding it wasn’t made me more determined to fix it…
Anyway, as part of that repair, I found that it used this design of spade connector:
I’ve seen the spade connectors with the retention bump before, but this one is more of a barb and there’s a lever to allow it to be released. Not seen these before, but definitely a nice design.
Yeah, decided it wasn’t super critical and used a more standard one. Though if I ever run out of the supply of connectors I have, I’ll consider them as it seems like a really good idea.
Today I took apart a guitar amp and the connector to the speaker was snapped. Ok no problem, get another from our assorted box and replace as it’s low voltage…. darn amplifier speaker has spade terminals that measure as 5.5mm wide, not the standard 4.8 or 6.3. Why be so? American sizes? It’s a Marshall amp.
Note, beware of using just any connectors that fits. Not all are not rated for high temp or current situations that may need to be made of a different material or plating. If it’s something like a Dualit 6 slot toaster, the full power is 3000w and that’s definitely not cheap brass crimp ends from Amazon or EBay.
So now I have to get the Dremmel out to trim the speaker spade terminal a bit, or work out where to find mid sized crimp cable terminators.
Perhaps a good separate question for the forum is. What common spare parts do you stock?
