A couple years ago, I talked with a company called Taiwan King Pin Terminal Co., Ltd. They have a catalog item that is close, P8800ID. I asked them for a quote for the same thing, but turned the way we're used to Z-connectors, and I have drawings for a P839618ID-09-02. There are a number of downsides, though.

1. The connectors are not breakaway, so you either need to order the correct number of pins or spent a lot more labor cutting them to length.
2. Their MOQ was 5000, and they wanted a $1100 tooling fee. No price per connector was given.
3. I really don't know what quality they would end up being. I don't have any samples of their other connectors.

Have there been any updates on alternatives for the Z-connectors? Is Stern still using them, say in Stranger Things?

I just used the last of the ones I had, and I'll sell through those in about 5 months. I'm not sure what I'll do once those are gone.

Mouser and Digikey didn't carry them even prior to the shutdown. GPE was the only place I was aware of to get them full sized (24 pin).

If I were Stern, I would have ditched them long ago. If I was building new stuff and insisted on using the 0.156" pitch connectors AND still wanted to be able to disconnect stuff like flashers, I'd use the male TE connectors.

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In my case, though, I'm using them for mods, and I have to play nicely with existing Pancon connectors. The TE male connectors do not mate with Pancon female.

In the cases where they're used, you're connecting wire to wire, so you need a male connector that can be terminated to a wire. For the 0.156" pitch connectors, those didn't exist in the Pancon line. They do in TE, as shown above. You might ask why they have stuck with the 0.156" connectors, but that's a whole other subject.

Actually, no. Even if they used the Molex KK crimp and stuff connectors, they still wouldn't have a wire-to-wire solution. They COULD change to a completely different line of connectors to make it work.

For mods, if you need to connect to existing 0.156" female connectors with a cable, a Z-connector (or equivalent) is necessary, even if you're not using IDC.

No need to concede. It's not a competition. You're not stupid, and I hope I'm not too old.

Wire-to-wire just mean you're trying to connect one wire to another. You're not connecting to a board in this case. Since you are using both connectors on wires, your choices are limited. With this style of connector (0.156" headers), nearly all of the ones that can be used on wires are female. Wire-to-wire results in female to female, which is where the Z comes in.

This also explains why the DumbAss boards work. They allow you to use board terminated connectors, which gives you male options.

I decided to give this a try. I'm not sure how practical this really is since it's 30 minutes to print one, then I had to manually press the pins in place. I also don't know where to get the correct pins. These were pulls from the key location of real MWWS156-1624.

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