Custom DAI connectors

I've now got a few of these connectors successfully made, and they work well. I never remade the mold; I continue to work with the one I have.

The approach now is to use hot glue to hold the two mold halves together, put masking tape on one side, add epoxy. Then once the epoxy has set but is still slightly malleable, I pull the back half of the mold off, leaving the pins in the other half. I poke around, loosening the epoxy from the aluminum, and then let it harden fully before completely detaching from the mold. This preserves the spacing, while greatly easing removal of the pins. Grabbing the epoxy connector with vise grips in order to pull the snug pins from the mold works quite well, in fact.

I never did further investigate making my own pins. I did just find some ~$35 DAI cables now being sold online, so I have a source of pins again... Ordered a pair just so I can assess the quality. (Answer: they're 2ft long, which is way too short for normal use, so they're going to be chopped up.)

I did a few weekends of work on this (summer 2014), which were successful and indicated ways to improve. Most importantly, I uploaded some pictures of this work!

In particular, I made my mold smaller than necessary; it was tricky to remove the epoxied part. I also need to find a better epoxy that is both easy to mix in tiny amounts, and hardens well. I did not try using any mold release agents, though a coworker gave me some. I probably will try this in the future, but I suspect I'll get greater improvements by modifying my aluminum mold slightly (more tapers, for example).

I am also thinking I will do an attempt with just hot glue. I suspect this will work, but due to softness, the tiny soldered connections will eventually break.