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C-Grid III alternative
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riscy00:
I have used Molex C-Grid III for some time, stamped contacts with 4 face. Now I'm seeking low cost variants, I open for suggestion. It can be 1.27mm, 2.0mm or 2.54mm for board to wires. I like to avoid single or double face contact solution where possible.
It is for surface instrument (0C to 85C or 125C) and lab use. Not for low cost home use.
Which few are best value and which few to keep away.
I had a look around in AliExpress and found Dupont Connector variants series but it is not locking type. Is the gold-plated contact the real thing?
Infraviolet:
Oh the horrors of trying to find nice, but also cheap, cabling solutions. I've tried this myself many times (albeit regarding replacing a different sort of cable in a different application to your needs) and never found a truly nice solution.
tooki:
I would much sooner use a single-beam name-brand contact than triple or quadruple beam aliexpress contacts.
In the end, the answer really depends on your needs. You can get clones of Molex SL (which is similar to C-Grid III), but I doubt they’re as good.
What’s the application exactly? If you just need one or two insertion cycles, cheap stuff is OK. But if you need more cycles, then you really don’t wanna cheap out. Cheap clone DuPont contacts are brass, which loses springiness very quickly, especially in the Chinese DuPont design. They get dramatically looser after just a few insertions. In contrast, Amphenol Mini-PV are good for a thousand cycles — they cost 20x as much, but last 200 times longer.
Some of the cheapest name-brand connectors are JST. Their own online store has surprisingly cheap shipping from Japan. For the most common JST contacts, reichelt.com (Germany) sells the original tooling at extremely competitive prices, even with shipping.
But I think the first thing you should decide is what your priority is. You start off by wanting a cheaper alternative to an already cheap connector, but then say it’s for non-hobby laboratory use, where I would think high reliability is far more important than saving a few cents. (At the university where I work, the mentality is absolutely one of dependability over cost, since you don’t want a failed 20¢ connector wasting hundreds or thousands of dollars in labor, or worse, even more if an entire experiment is ruined.)*
As for whether the gold really is or not: I don’t have the knowledge and materials to test it, but I haven’t had any problem with supposedly gold plated Chinese DuPont contacts. I have, however, had problems with some “gold” PCB headers! Whatever they were, it wasn’t gold, because you couldn’t solder them. Even with extra flux, they just wouldn’t wet.
* I once had to cut off and replace 50 contacts, at $3 each, because they had given me incorrect specifications the first time around…
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