Reclaiming and Modifying DIN plugs for projects (pictorial)

[GearTechWolf]

I got these severed cord-ends from the trash at a recycling center based in a local homeless shelter.

Today, I'm going to show you how I broke them down for direct re-use instead of just bodging wires onto the cut end of the cord, leaving a weak-point in the cord you build.
As you can see, I cut the outer sheathing along the mold-line on one side and peeled out the wires, potting, and plug from the core. (this does create a fair amount of waste, but now you can attach wires of larger size if needed!)

This next plug was the one from the cord of a Commodore power supply, it was molded in a slightly different way, as a singular piece instead of the two-part design above.
This required that I fully split it down the middle before I could take it fully apart.
Another difference, is that the outer shield is not attached* to the central pin-holding piece (not even keyed to it!) and isn't electrically attached either.
In the latter three pictures of this grouping you can see where I've started carving out excess plastic from the inside of the sheathing halves.
I did this to illustrate that even it could be reused with new or bigger wires if so desired. *(this was to my advantage and sparked the idea!)

Here you can see that the DIN-5 plug has mold-marks that could make it a DIN-7 or DIN-8 if they were drilled out and populated, which is exactly what I did to make a full 7-pin power-plug.

Part 1/3

 

[GearTechWolf]

Unfortunately, this is not so easily done with the sockets, as they have forked pin-receivers that are mounted in a round hole with a slot bisecting it.

I was able to drill off the melted plastic lug that held on the small piece of unclad PCB that held the pin-receivers in on this crusty old board-mount DIN-5 socket, and remove them.

Next, with the final unprocessed plug, a tear-down series!
First, split the outer sheathing down one side and peel back to find out which type of interior it has.
(if it doesn't have the two-part design it will be nearly impossible to splay open)
Here it is with the core removed and a close-up showing the shield ground-wire through the translucent potting.

The next step is to remove the bulk of the potting.
It is fairly soft and easily cut with a blade, but be sure to cut far enough back to miss the ends of the pins.

Part 2/3

 

[GearTechWolf]

Here, another shot of cutting through it with my choice of tool, a broken, dulled, and multiple times resharpened Stanley utility-knife blade.

Then a couple shots of the cut ends, showing how the cut was angle and barely missed the solder-cup ends of a couple pins.

Once it's to this point, all you have to do is use a small flat-bladed screwdriver to lever off the remaining disk of potting material.

But, while all pins are round on the side which plugs into the machine, they are not al;ways the same!
My first run-through I found two kind of pins, the ones from the commodore power-cord had larger solder-cups to match the larger wires, while the recycled keyboard-cord pins were simply hollow at the solder-end.
Here you can see one of those small-cup pins and one of the pins from the one I just took apart, it has its own unique shape to the solder-end!

Here you can see what that looks like where the pins plug into the central plastic holder, round on one side and larger non-round on the other.

Finally, how I used the central plastic pin-holder from the Commodore power-cord plug as a drill-guide to place the additional two holes in the plastic piece from the old keyboard cord.
Using two pins in the lower holes of the commodore part, I lined up the remaining two holes at the top and drilled them out.

Unfortunately, as I lacked a small-enough (possibly metric?) drill-bit, those final two pins don't have a tight press-fit.
I'm going to both glue them into the plastic pin-holder at the right depth, and re-pot the pins/wires inside the sheathing.
That's pretty much it. Hope some of you find this useful and have fun out there!
Oh, also, I've salvaged USB connectors (both genders) this way too! (except no pin-swapping shenanigans, ideally at least)
Time to post this before I lose it to another computer crash!