AMP will soon be the only high quality supplier. The Far East suppliers still will send junk unless you have someone there to inspect each shipment, which is only feasible for huge quantities.

The AMP stuff is mostly made in Asia, but, good quality control before it gets here.

It is a big let down that quality suffers in this highly electronic world. Thanks for the update.

Ken

Ed, thanks for looking out for us.
Keep up the good work.
I know if you are selling it , the product is the best quality for the price that is available.

& this is why GPE is my go to supplier for pinball electronic parts.
He cares about supplying quality parts.

Well that sucks to hear quality is going down. I just checked molex boxes and the 24pin cut to size headers are made in Mexico date 1840. The Mate-N-Lok style by molex say India tho and I couldnt find a date. They come in a molded plastic in a box and looked like they made it here OK.

I use a lot of the no locking channel KK cut to size 24pin 1.56" headers. Last time i looked around I couldn't find a good Asian equivalent or something like the GPE value line 0.100" cut to size no lock headers (which i also use lots of).

I have been pretty satisfied with the 0.156" locking headers from Tayda. In some test gear I have with tons of connector cycles there is a mix of tayda (brand X) and molex 0.156" headers with lock channel. The plating on the Tayda headers lasted as long or longer than the similar type molex brand headers before insertion cycling rubbed the plating off.

Allan, who was a Bally engineer and posts here, told an interesting story about the molex pins burning up on the bally rectifier board and why they switched to the mat-n-lok plugs which would fall into the molex being taboo world.

FTR, I've always used and preferred TE/AMP myself. Their pins just seem to work (crips, insert) better, tighter.

Here's something that's irked me..

I bought a ton of 2.54mm plastic keying pins. Thin bits of plastic that must cost $0.00002 to produce. Yet, I've thrown out probably a few dozen or more because the ends of them are broken. These are NEW parts. And cost me like $0.03-0.05ea, I'd have to look. But it's expensive enough and just annoying to buy new parts and have to figure 5% of them are going to have to be tossed.

So if I want to be able to crimp my own power connectors, what should I buy? Any recommendation on tools and connectors themselves?

Thanks for keeping things going! Not sure what I'd do without Great Plains Electronics - my 'go to' business for Gottlieb edge connectors, and all other misc electronic parts.

YES! Thank you Ed for all you do to keep this hobby going!

It is posts like this that trigger my hoarding gene!

This is not good news Ed. We are currently looking at using Molex on a new product we are developing. May have to rethink that. Thanks for the heads up. John

I don't think I'm ever going to be in the market for connectors or pins since I purchased all I will ever need back in the late 80's early 90's, but this is good info. Thanks for the heads-up, Ed.

Note 5 in the attached pic -"DIMENSIONS GIVEN ACROSS CENTERLINES ARE SYMETRICAL ABOUT THOSE CENTERINES WITHIN HALF THE TOTAL TOLERANCE."

Um...... No they are not. Not even close.

WTH is with that flange on the left side.... o_O

Problems with the punch die when it was separated from the spool. I get that once in a while when my press doesn’t index properly

Yeah, I was just reading that other linked thread....maybe the vendor (Waldom) running the despooler too quick, he said.

Janky. -_-

More likely too much tension on the spool and it’s not advancing far enough. That’s what usually happens on mine to cause that.

Upvote for the update (not that depressing quality / situation)

so sad - thx for sharing your experiences and fighting for us Ed!

That's.... a thing.

I'm actually going to need a pin extractor soon, what do you recommend at this point?