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12 Volt Power Strip Project Page 2
Above left is the connector after I've taken the black and red screw terminals off of them.  I decided to pre-coat them with
soldier to make them easier to work with.  (It didn't help much)  Above right is the drawing I made of where I want to connect
the wires.  I did them in a pattern.  Below left is the eye-screws that you don't see in the final product.  I wanted to put these in next
to the terminals so I could keep things tidy and organized by feeding the wires from the radios through them before going to the connectors.
Anyway it turns out that I didn't drill THOSE holes big enough either and I didn't want to crack the plexiglass so I put that off
for now, I'll probably do it later.  The bottom right picture is the terminals.  I bent them all at 90 degree angles.


The board ready all drilled and ready to go!


The board with the top sheet of paper removed!


All of the paper is removed.  I've started putting in the brass bolts, washers and nuts here.  I've left a small
piece of paper stuck to each of the sheets in the top right hand corner so I won't try and put the bottom
sheet on the wrong direction1 :)


Top view!


  I have my handy man holding the board up for me and you can see the first two terminals in place!


Ok, all of the terminals are in place and it's time to get busy!


Here I've just put some nuts on the bolts a little ways down so I can do a test mount of the bottom plate
of plexiglass.  I'm going to put washers on these, then the plexiglass, then more washers and then the nuts!


First fitting of the bottom sheet and everything looks good.  Here I kind of adjusted the nuts to make room
for the washers and bottom nuts.


And the wiring begins!  Boy it sure is taking a LOT longer to soldier the wires than I
had originally planned.  Maybe a bigger gun and thicker soldier would have helped?
(e-mail me if your experienced in this!:)  The single wire ones were easy but the rest
where I had to soldier two wires to the terminal were harder!


You can kind of see some shape here.  On most of the double soldier joints what I wound up
doing was taking some stripped 28 gage wire and wrapping the terminal plate and both wires
to keep everything in place and then just soldiering it all together.  The soldier joints are
NOT pretty.  Not even.  Hopefully functional though.  I don't want to have to redo the work.


All of the wiring is done and now the meter is installed!  I've just run 28 gage wire for the meter
terminals.


A front view of the finished top plate!

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