I have seen in two different cables now on ebike stuff a wire splice inside the sheathed wire, so from the wire/cable factory.
One on the Fusin when I was stripping wires for the installation:
http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=232834#p232834
I can't remember what wire that was, but it was spliced like that *inside the molded sheathing*.
I didn't take a picture of it, but one of the wires on a (Crystalyte?) thumb throttle donated to me was like this too, only it wasn't sort-of-woven/twisted-together like the above. It had just been "frayed", then lapped by pushing the strands in amongst each other, then rolled together. No solder. It had pulled almost completely apart as I stripped off the black sheathing; it could have even done that on it's own just from wire stretch. It's the one on DGA right now.
So the same kind of thing could be happening to cables in any part of an ebike kit, even the good brands and resellers, because they would never even know the wire was being spliced together this way at the wire factory unless they happened to run into such a splice when cutting into the cable for assembly.
I suspect it is done when one color of a wire runs out on it's spool and they are making multi-wire cable. Instead of just stopping then, they just twist in the new spool of that color and continue. If they do it right, then except for oxidation from any humidity or contamination that gets into the splice at that point during manufacture, it'd be fine for years, at least.
But if they don't do it right, like on the second cable I saw, then any stretching of the cable as a whole could pull the wires apart. If there is any real current draw thru that wire for any reason, it could arc and spark and burn away over time as it connects/disconnects, so seem working sometimes and others not, for no obvious reason, and then at some point just stop completely. Or worse, if it does arc, it could melt the really thin really cheap plastic insulation between other wires in the cable (without leaving any obvious sign on the outer sheathing) and then *they* could short together, making things much worse than just an open wire.
Because these splices probably only happen when wire color spools are changed as they run out, then the more wires in a cable the more likely a problem will happen in any given length of cable. So hall cables are more likely than throttle cables to have a problem, since there are at least 5 wires in the hall cable and probably only 3 in the throttle cable, sometimes four.
Actual incidence rates of splices occuring vs a specific cable length could be estimated if I knew what spool size they use to make these cables from, on average (since I'm sure they're not all the same length). In fact, it's possible that it happens more on larger gauge cables due to less wire on the same size spool as a smaller gauge, assuming there is only one type of fixture used to make these regardless of wire size feeding the cable assembly.
Let's just be silly and assume a 1000' spool of wire, that could have one or two feet more or less of wire than it should on every spool. So at first start of manufacture, the cable will only have a splice every 998 to 1002 feet. After enough of these have been done, if one color wire or another consistently is shorter than others for any reaosn, it is possible they could have splices happening every 333 feet or so for a 3 wire cable, or every 200 feet for a 5 wire cable.
How long is the average cable on an ebike kit? 6 feet? 10 feet? Let's say 6 feet. So for a 5 wire cable, 200 feet cut into 6 foot lengths you could wind up with a random internal splice point every 33 kits! That's a very high incidence. But it's worse than that--you could have more than one of these spliced cables in every kit, on different things. Hall wire gets one every 33 kits. 4 wire throttle gets one every 41 kits. 3 wire ebrake every 56 ebrakes, but since there's two of those in every kit it could happen every 28 kits!
I don't know enough about statistics to say how often any of this would actually happen, but out of maybe a total of a foot of total wire that I have stripped back on one throttle plus one kit's worth of stuff, I've found two splices like this. Coincidence? Epidemic? I dunno.
But it bears thinking about.
One on the Fusin when I was stripping wires for the installation:
http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=232834#p232834
I can't remember what wire that was, but it was spliced like that *inside the molded sheathing*.
I didn't take a picture of it, but one of the wires on a (Crystalyte?) thumb throttle donated to me was like this too, only it wasn't sort-of-woven/twisted-together like the above. It had just been "frayed", then lapped by pushing the strands in amongst each other, then rolled together. No solder. It had pulled almost completely apart as I stripped off the black sheathing; it could have even done that on it's own just from wire stretch. It's the one on DGA right now.
So the same kind of thing could be happening to cables in any part of an ebike kit, even the good brands and resellers, because they would never even know the wire was being spliced together this way at the wire factory unless they happened to run into such a splice when cutting into the cable for assembly.
I suspect it is done when one color of a wire runs out on it's spool and they are making multi-wire cable. Instead of just stopping then, they just twist in the new spool of that color and continue. If they do it right, then except for oxidation from any humidity or contamination that gets into the splice at that point during manufacture, it'd be fine for years, at least.
But if they don't do it right, like on the second cable I saw, then any stretching of the cable as a whole could pull the wires apart. If there is any real current draw thru that wire for any reason, it could arc and spark and burn away over time as it connects/disconnects, so seem working sometimes and others not, for no obvious reason, and then at some point just stop completely. Or worse, if it does arc, it could melt the really thin really cheap plastic insulation between other wires in the cable (without leaving any obvious sign on the outer sheathing) and then *they* could short together, making things much worse than just an open wire.
Because these splices probably only happen when wire color spools are changed as they run out, then the more wires in a cable the more likely a problem will happen in any given length of cable. So hall cables are more likely than throttle cables to have a problem, since there are at least 5 wires in the hall cable and probably only 3 in the throttle cable, sometimes four.
Actual incidence rates of splices occuring vs a specific cable length could be estimated if I knew what spool size they use to make these cables from, on average (since I'm sure they're not all the same length). In fact, it's possible that it happens more on larger gauge cables due to less wire on the same size spool as a smaller gauge, assuming there is only one type of fixture used to make these regardless of wire size feeding the cable assembly.
Let's just be silly and assume a 1000' spool of wire, that could have one or two feet more or less of wire than it should on every spool. So at first start of manufacture, the cable will only have a splice every 998 to 1002 feet. After enough of these have been done, if one color wire or another consistently is shorter than others for any reaosn, it is possible they could have splices happening every 333 feet or so for a 3 wire cable, or every 200 feet for a 5 wire cable.
How long is the average cable on an ebike kit? 6 feet? 10 feet? Let's say 6 feet. So for a 5 wire cable, 200 feet cut into 6 foot lengths you could wind up with a random internal splice point every 33 kits! That's a very high incidence. But it's worse than that--you could have more than one of these spliced cables in every kit, on different things. Hall wire gets one every 33 kits. 4 wire throttle gets one every 41 kits. 3 wire ebrake every 56 ebrakes, but since there's two of those in every kit it could happen every 28 kits!
I don't know enough about statistics to say how often any of this would actually happen, but out of maybe a total of a foot of total wire that I have stripped back on one throttle plus one kit's worth of stuff, I've found two splices like this. Coincidence? Epidemic? I dunno.
But it bears thinking about.
