floor cable issue

[Pho]

Hey guys,

One of my floor cords is acting really strangely. When connected to an eigertek machine and plugged into my epees (which work when used with other floor cords), the machine refuses to go off, when the tip is depressed. The machine goes off however when I unplug the epee and test it on the bellguard. Other floor cords do not show any problems with the machine. I have tried spreading out the prongs on the floor cord to no avail. Does anybody have any idea what could causing the floor cord to fail? thanks in advance.

Eric

[neevel]

Let me verify if I'm interpreting your description of the problem correctly:

You're testing if the A-B loop of the floor cord is working by plugging it into the box and an epee and depressing the epee's tip. When you have this particular cord plugged into the epee, you do not get a light by depressing the point, but you are able to get a light by shorting the A and B pins of the plug against the epee's guard. Right? The epee works fine with other all the other floor cords in this manner, so we'll assume for now that it's OK.

A likely cause of the problem would be an intermittent break of the A- or B- wire either in the plug or directly behind the plug, that gets closed up by the way you're holding the plug when shorting the pins with the guard, but then opens up after being plugged into the epee due to the cord flexing. I don't recall with certainty how the Eigertek handles it (I can check later tonight), but an intermittent short between A or B and C could also cause no light to show. With some machines, such as the SG series, a short to one's own C will not prevent the light going off (in fact, the SG machines will give a false touch if A and B are shorted together to C).

No matter how you test a cord, you should be flexing and gently tugging the cord and plug to turn up any intermittent problems that may not show up if you're holdling the plug still. I'd also recommend going out and spending the $15 for a cheap ohmmeter to use for testing, along with a few stackable test leads.

-Dave

[oiuyt]

Dave got all of the obvious problems, another (remote) possibility is that you're right at the threshold for resistence before the circuit doesn't conduct enough current to read as completed. If this floor cord is your highest resistence cord and the weapon is high enough resistence the combination could make this pairing fail even though every other pairing you have would still pass. The bell test removes the resistence in the epee, bringing you back under threshold. Note that in this case you're likely to have both cords and epee that have illegally high amounts of resistnce. Dave's right, if you really want to test things you need a multimeter.

-B :)