Just found out most of my coax ends are probably garbage

I was at a supply house in Cleveland last Tuesday picking up some fittings and an old timer behind the counter asked me what I used for compression. I told him my Klein ratcheting tool and he just shook his head and showed me his collection of rejected ends from other guys he knows. Turns out a ton of those cheap generic compression connectors you grab in bulk packs have way too much variance in the inner diameter. He pulled out a caliper and measured three different ones from the same box and they were all off by like 0.005 inches. I went home and checked a handful of my recent jobs and I bet I got at least 10 percent that are gonna fail within a year. I never even thought to measure them before. Anyone else ever check their connector tolerances or just trust the package?

2 comments

2 Comments

fiona_young21d ago

That quote about 'off by like 0.005 inches' got me thinking. My buddy Mike does commercial installs and he had a whole spool of coax that kept giving him weird signal loss issues. He finally borrowed a micrometer from his neighbor who works in a machine shop and found every connector was undersized by a hair. He ended up tossing a whole box of 50 ends, said he couldnt trust a single one after that.

mila_flores821d ago

Honestly @fiona_young, that sounds like overkill to me. I get that signal loss is annoying but tossing 50 ends just seems like a waste of money for something you could've probably fixed with a barrel connector or two.