How To Build Battery Pigtailsfor your Swimmy Thang

The Little Benthic Vehicle is pictured above.

Here is how to build simple pigtails for your battery so that you can have a safe connection between your motor controller assembly and the battery.

You will need:

16 inches of black 14 gauge stranded wire
16 inches of red 14 gauge stranded wire
1 inline fuse holder and fuse from Kragen's
1 pair of Ring Terminals available at Kragen's
1 pair of banana jacks ( Google search for part online!)
you will also need:

a soldering iron
solder
heat gun
wire strippers
and heat shrink tubing

Cut your red wire in half. Strip 1/4 inch of insulation off of each end of your red and black wires and off the ends of the wires on your fuse holder.

Slide a piece of heat shrink tubing over each red wire and solder the fuse holder on to the red wire. Trim the wire with the fuse holder installed so that it is the same length as the black wire.

Slide two pieces of 2 inch long heat shrink tubing over each wire. (On the red wire be sure you have one on each end with the fuse holder in between!)

Carefully solder the ring terminals and the banana jacks to the wires. (Each wire should have one ring terminal, and one banana jack!)

Use the heat gun to shrink the heat shrink tubing over the solder joints where the ring terminals and the banana jacks connect to the wire.

If you want to waterproof these connections you can do so by putting 5 minute epoxy over the solder joints before you shrink the heat shrink tubing. ( Do not wait for the epoxy to dry before you shrink the tubing! The shrinking of the tubing forces the epoxy into all the little nooks and crannys!)

When you are done you should have something that looks like this: