Trouble soldering pancake jacks

prowla

They are right sods to solder.

You need something to hold them in place, or the twist of the wire will shift them around as you want them to be still.

On mine, the sleeve/casing contact had a tab too.

I tend to feed the wire through the holes in the tabs and snip them off after.

english_bob

prowla said:

They are right sods to solder.

You need something to hold them in place, or the twist of the wire will shift them around as you want them to be still.

On mine, the sleeve/casing contact had a tab too.

I tend to feed the wire through the holes in the tabs and snip them off after.

I've just done a batch of pancake jacks, and they really are a bugger. I've learned a few things over the years:

1. Hold them still. I wrap an elastic band around the handles of a pair of long nosed pliers to keep them closed, then use those to grip the plugs while I'm soldering.

2. Tin the cables before you try to solder them in place. Helps them stick, and helps stop stray wires from ending up where they shouldn't. A few strands from the shielding in contact with the signal wire will cause a partial short, and you'll get a loss of volume and general signal good-ness. 

3. If you're not using the Hicon plugs with a tab for the shield wire, then before you attach the shielding cable, heat the casing and stick a blob of solder to it. Works much better than trying to solder the cable in place straight away, as the casing needs to get fairly hot to bond with the solder and the wire will conduct heat away.

4. Snip the end off the signal wire where it passes through the solder tab. There's very little space between the tab and the casing so there's a good chance the wire will contact the casing and you'll get no sound.

5. Buy cheap, buy twice. I bought a bunch of dirt cheap Chinese pancake jacks that were all wobbly and unreliable (I was replacing these last night). If you don't want to spend nearly a fiver each on the Switchcraft plugs, or as a slightly cheaper alternative to the Hicon ones, the ones sold by Underwood Audio on eBay are good. 

6. If you're doing several for a pedalboard or something, check each cable before you plug them all in, or you'll take forever working out what's wrong.

7. If you think pancake jacks are a pain to solder, I recommend trying a 5 pin DIN (MIDI) plug.

(cue one-upmanship from professional solderers who once did a 35-pin micro connector in a thunderstorm up a lamp-post using a knitting needle heated over a match for a soldering iron, lit by an extra-dim orange LED clamped around a button cell battery between their teeth).