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The Twingo Lord

What connector do you use and why?

What connector do you use and why?  

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Tamiya, never had a problem. Even with lipo, but i only use 2s and the hottest motors i use are 14t brushed and 13.5t brushless.

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Xt60 for small things like cars, xt90 for big RC.

Handle the current well, they're cheap and easy to solder to. 

I used deans years ago, also good connectors but xt are neater to wire up and I've had some issues with the leaf spring deforming over time which leads to intermittent contact. This may be down to cheap/imitation deans because totally genuine ones are silly money a pair. 

I do not rate Tamiya connectors really. Flimsy and outdated. I think they're a bottleneck unless you're on low discharge NIMH and silver can motors.

I've always found ec5 very good but I never got the hang of putting them together - again perhaps due to cheap knock offs. 

XT60 is absolutely perfect for this level of RC imo

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Depends on the battery.

NiMH = Tamiya, mostly in vintage/re-re cars. No need to change the plugs that everything old already has.

Lipo = Deans. Have used them for a couple of decades now, no reason to bother trying anything else. This is for the racier vintage re-re cars, and scaler/crawlers, but still fairly mild motors. (I don't bother with brushless.)

I also have a couple of adapters I have made (Deans to Tamiya, and Tamiya to Deans), so I can bend these usage rules where appropriate.

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XT90, use it across all my models. 
 

I find them easy ish to solder, on things like my larger Traxxas brushless cars, and my boats they offer the current handling I need. Since all my battery’s are thus used for those, then everything has to have that plug. 
 

xt60 is a much easier plug to handle. 
 

when I was a teenager I had too many Tamiya plugs weld themselves together when using modified motors (mostly 11-16T) so I used deans then. Later I switched to Traxxas, then ec5 then finally XT90. That’s 25 years of battery plug history for me lol. 
 

Having tried most plugs, I honestly believe XT60/90 is the best option. Easiest to solder (assuming you leave them connected together when you do it to prevent the pins melting the casing during soldering) they have a solid connection, near impossible to come apart. Can handle nearly any current requirement. 
 

deans, I never liked the springy plate on them, they are also small and easy to melt during soldering. When using 12awg wire the plug is too tiny, making it more difficult to solder without joining +\- together, with lipo = disaster. 
 

traxxas, the soldering must be precision or they won’t assemble. The pins pull out of the plastic carrier too easily. 
 

ec5, again soldering must be precision or they won’t assemble together. 
 

XT90, plenty of room for 12awg wiring, simple and easy to solder, most come with a cap, no need for heat shrink. 

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All my Tamiya are deans, think I've stuck with deans as the first lipos I bought came with them, so the subsequently, esc's and chargers all got deans too. I've had the odd solder melt, but nothing major.

Tamiya (molex) are only ok upto small amp draw, even swapped them for bullets bitd, melted a few of these.

My Race cars use 4mm bullets.

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Dean's on everything that has connectors, 4mm bullets on the racier stuff. Dean's are nice and small, and easy to get.

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I used deans forever but I just tried ec3 and I like that there is more surface area to grab when unplugging. some of my deans are hard to grab without feeling your  pulling on the wires.

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I switched to Deans about 12 or so years ago, and have stuck with it because it's too much cost and hassle to change.  TBH I find Deans a bit of a pain to solder and even more of a pain to get my mitts on to plug / unplug, but the pain in converting everything is too high, so I am pretty much locked in.  That said, one of my recent ESCs came with an XT60 connector and so did the LiPos that I intend to use for it, so that's started the slow switch.

My next batch of connectors will probably by XT60 and I'll make up some conversion leads to deal with the smaller stuff until I get around to converting everything.

By the time I'm done the world will have moved on and there will be an even better solution available.

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2 hours ago, markbt73 said:

Depends on the battery.

NiMH = Tamiya, mostly in vintage/re-re cars. No need to change the plugs that everything old already has.

Lipo = Deans. Have used them for a couple of decades now, no reason to bother trying anything else. This is for the racier vintage re-re cars, and scaler/crawlers, but still fairly mild motors. (I don't bother with brushless.)

I also have a couple of adapters I have made (Deans to Tamiya, and Tamiya to Deans), so I can bend these usage rules where appropriate.

Same here, although I run brushless on Deans & LiPo.

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There's a trick to Deans plugs: put a small O-ring around each of the male terminals. That way, there's a little gap between the halves. Makes it much easier to pull apart.

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I use Deans and Bullet. I have also made a Deans to Bullet connector for charging or battery lending purposes.

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I started with Traxxas plugs, but was convinced to go to Deans.. and they suck! They're too small, massive bottleneck if there's LiPos involved.

I went back to Traxxas, because with 30+ vehicles it's easier to have one standard connector, and I like how easy it is to grab them when they're wet/hot/cold etc.

(the exception being my Proboat Sonicwake, which has the most ridiculous current draw, and so now my 3S batteries use EC5, and I just run adaptors for my X-Maxx).

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I use Anderson.  With the crimp tool they work super easy.  I always feel like I should go back to Dean's or switch to xt60 but I'm pretty happy with the ease of use of the Anderson's and can't bring myself to do it.  I have an Arrma Kraton 6s NIB and I'm not sure I trust the Anderson connectors to that kind of amperage.

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years ago I got sick of the tamiya connectors and switched to XT60 as they were cheap to buy and pretty easy to solder, haven't looked back.

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always used deans until bullet connectors came into play for batterys. Now Im looking at the XT60's more and more as they seem like a great option instead of deans, with the plus of making a good connection and being easy to wire up. With deans they will only become hard to pull apart when the plastic was melted during soldering. If the flat plates on deans get out of alignment then its hard to plug in or unplug them. You can only put a iron on the deans plugs for a couple seconds to not melt them. I use a set of hemistats on the other side of the plug to help pull out the heat while soldering. Chinese knockoff deans also work well but they wear out much faster than genuine deans. 

 

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I put other because I use Tamiya, Deans and even traxxas on a couple.

If I ever stop being lazy though I'm converting the whole fleet and my batteries to XT60. A couple will be XT90 (big stuff).

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I find the Tamiya connectors cumbersome and clumsy, so I plan to learn to solder so I can fit XT60 to my runners. 

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Tamiya/molex for me. I only run brushed motors (usually nothing more than a silvercan or Torque Tuned) and Nimh batteries. I know there are far better connectors out there but the old school Tamiya connector peaking out of the side of a vintage buggy or monster truck is part of the experience for me at this point.

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Surprised so many still use and want to use Tamiya plugs. I had these fail on me about 30 years ago when running nothing more than 6 cell NiCd packs. Dreadful connectors really and very restrictive too by all accounts.

Have run a number of plugs over the years. Deans are ok and do the job, but are small and fiddly to unplug, plus cheap ones melt easily when soldering. I used to run Powerpole (Anderson) and I'm pleased to see others did/do as well. Good connectors and no complaints with them really. I only really changed as in the UK at one point they become difficult to get hold of. Also soldering them up is a bit of an art form sometimes.

Also used Corally bullet plugs, Very good and easy, but worked best with saddle pack setups and not so good for newbs.

EC5 connectors are very good. But I found them a littler pricey to buy. By far and away the best connectors are the XT60's though. Compact, but so much easier to use than Deans and I believe with similar real world current capabilities. They are also super easy to solder, probably the easiest of all the connectors. And they are cheap to buy and easy to get hold of. If you have high current applications I'd probably opt for the XT90, but most 1/10th RC needs should likely be fine with the XT60.

 

And as an added bonus for any who don't know. The male (battery) EC5 plug will connect to the female (ESC) XT60. So if you run XT60's you can safely plug in batteries with EC5 connectors too, which can be handy.

 

IMG_1486.JPG

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I went to deans years ago after constantly melting the tamiya connectors together, I bought a massive bulk pack of them so just put them on everything.... I have only just started to run out but probably won't change now. They are easy to solder on and the newer ones with the 'grip' part are easy to use.

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Never had a problem with Tamiya connectors. Have used them in cars and boats for years but recently swapped all to XT60's. Nice and easy to solder and really good conection

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I'll add, in the decades I've been doing this, I've only ever had one "fail". The female prongs in a Duratrax variant of the plug spread and allowed the power to cut on and off. Some tweaking with a small screwdriver and all was good. On the other hand, the pure facts are that Tamiya connectors are more restrictive and other folks have actually melted them so, as usual, your mileage may vary.

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