This is nothing magic but worth a mention. Being fundamentally lazy I don’t like to assemble and solder electronic multi-way connectors. There is never enough room to work on the contacts and the cables never lay up how you would like them to. This could have course be a function of my eyesight ..
I am currently working on boxing and installing the Tormach USB Expansion Board which has a USB connector interface. I wanted the cable to pass through some form of gland into the box but didn’t want to cut a standard USB cable and remake the connector at one end of the other.
After some head scratching I came up with the following simple cable gland/cable grip. It is nothing revolutionary but made life easy and the parts only took 20 minutes to design in Fusion 360 and then 3D print on the Sindoh 3DWOX.
It has two identical semicircular halves that hold the cable and there is a ring that pushes over these on the outside of the box. A small flange holds these in place on the inside of the box. The hole in the box and the ring inside diameter are both 16mm to allow the USB connector largest dimension to pass through. This is also one of the standard cut rings on a cone cut hole drill which makes cutting the hole in the box very straightforward.
Not rocket science but you never know it might come in useful and the dimensions can be tweaked to suit other cables and connectors. Similar or related subjects : –
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The outer holes are for the M8 clamping to the table and the four smaller holes are the tooling holes. Being tight with my materials I did not want to just mill out the centre of the plate and have a mountain of swarf (chips). Instead I designed it with two slots as shown, one for the clamping surface and one that almost cut through the stock. The partial cut was to ensure the central piece did not flip out once cut free and damage my cutter. First one half was drilled and cut and then the plate was rotated 180 degrees and the second half cut. This left the central island just held in place by less than 0.5mm of material. This was easy to hand cut through to liberate the central area. The plate was then turned over and the cut edge cleaned using the same tooling position and doing the same 180 degree rotation. To my surprise the rotation process on the tooling pins worked very well with only a minor step transition at the overlap point on all cuts. This was probably more down to my 3.7mm tooling pins being not quite concentrically turned from 4mm silver steel. With this finished I now had a much more robust clamp for the PCB material. I had made the clamping step 4mm deep so I could put sacrificial backing boards behind the PCB being run. This would allow drilling through as needed. Checking the flatness of a clamped PCB blank with my Haimer showed variation of a few thou in the top surface of the PCB Z position. The worst case variation in Z was at dead centre where the PCB’s natural bow was most dominant.
