Phoenix Gold Phorum

over the past few years I realized how much better it is to solder a connection rather then the alternatives, but tonight it was proven to me. about a month ago I dropped my stang off at a buddy's house that was going to install some trickflow heads/cam and let me watch/help so I could learn more about motors. We did the swap and started it up and damnit it ran HORRIBLE. I mean it hardly started, would not idle and was backfiring and buckin and kickin like I have never seen a motor do before. The guy I had showing me is a service station manager with a 700+ hp fox body stang that will run mid 5s on the 1/8th that he built and races so he knows motors and especially the 302 I have. He was all confused and over the last three weeks we have torn it back down to readjust the valves, replace a broken phenolic spacer and did everything we could think of. Finally last night the noticed two small things we suspected, a butt connector on the dist wire for the alarm that looked pretty old as well as small crack in the dist cap. they got a new cap today and were going to install it but was amazed to find it fire right up tonight, idle fine and rev perfectly. It seems as though the butt connector on the tach wire had developed some corrosion. While handling it last night to inspect it and moving it around must have cleaned up the corrosion.

Like I said over the past 5 yrs I have been slowly switching over to soldering more and more but after this I will only crimp when I cannot avoid it. If you plan on keepin a car for a while I would recomend you use your iron over your crimper as I basically saved 10 mins 7 yrs ago to wast 3 weeks of mine and my buddies time or saved a nickel to spend a dollar.

I have been soldering everything for years as well. I usually use a non insulated crimp connector first, then solder it, then use high quality shrink tube over it all.

I have found that boat supply places have the good shrink tube in stock most of the time, nice thick wall and have glue on the inside.

When i used to be a auto mechanic i would trace bad crimp connectors all the time, hate them. The crimp connectors that have the shrinking insulation work better, but still not great.

napa sells the good heatshrink as well. I swapped over to soldering most of my connections years ago realizing that the mechanical connection on the crimps is eventualy bound to fail. If you only have a car for a couple years it would not matter but I am NOT selling the momstang ever so....