Castle Connectors. Manufacturing defect OR counterfeits?

[Steve Graham]

Lately I've had a couple unexplained motor shutdowns. This in part drove me to get a new radio with telemetry but that is not the question here.

I soldered up some new batteries recently and found that they were nearly impossible to push together or pull apart. I already had the adjustment tool that Clint Akins posted a video on and have been using it. This was different in that as I started trying a few different batteries I discovered it was the BATTERY female connectors that were the culprit. Somehow I ended up with some of the connectors that I keep on hand with a smaller than spec internal diameter. I provided a couple of pictures of all the female connectors I have on hand showing their internal diameters. The suspect connectors are the six on the lower line that have ID's of only 6.42mm. I think the two lines above are OK. What happens with these connectors is that they are so tight that you will think the male ESC connector needs to be squeezed down. After doing this you may be able to get them shoved home but later when using a correctly specd. female, the male will be so loose as to nearly be falling out. Making this kind of failure difficult to isolate is the fact that at least on one of my battery connectors I had one of each ID inserted into the plastic housing. This lead to a situation where one side was very tight but the other was nearly falling out and I did not know it because the connector felt normal friction when pushing together.

This situation is completely bizarre and I really think somehow I must have gotten a hold of a knockoff set of connectors. I buy these frequently from what I thought were reputable sources but I wanted to warn people that this may be occurring and they may not even be aware of it. I will start measuring all my connectors going forward to ensure I don't get any more of the under specd females on my batteries.

Pic 3 shows two males that are also suspect. Notice the different shape of the tip of the connector and fingers. They do measure the same diameter. In the picture one looks longer but when measured is within about a half mm of the other.

I'm going to the LHS to look at some packaged connectors to do some more comparative analysis.

[crashcopterman]

Steve

I just bought a shit ton of these 3 weeks ago, I will check mine after work and report ASAP.

Cheers

Steve

[Pygmaeus]

I have 4 packages of each and checked them all. The female connectors measure 6.38mm to 6.42 mm. The males connectors are all like the connectors on the left. All were purchased from castle creations via amazon

[crashcopterman]

Mine were all very consistent, except for the one ESC bullet on the right, oooops. The battery ends were +/- .01mm or so as I didn't feel i needed to spend much time on them as they were so similar. These were all purchased from my LHS. Hope this helps.

Steve






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