Look at the following drawing. You'll notice that the connection is indeed from one side to the other through that little plate (that the store guy erroneously told you to pop out). All terminal blocks are made that way. That is the purpose of a terminal block.
In my first drawing you'll see how to hook up a terminal block in such a way that you get one wire in and the maximum number of wires out. (Quick on the image to make it full size)
The wire in can be positive or negative and all of the wires out with this set up will maintain the same polarity.
You can get jumper strips that make it easy to hook all of the wires on one side together or you can use little short lengths of wire to go from screw to screw.
If you want to use the terminal strip to have both positive (hot) and negative (common) wires use the following drawing. Note that the positive side and negative side are NOT connected.
Hope this helps
Woodlandtoots
The way these are normally used is as follows:
- each individual screw in a row is electrically tied to the corresponding screw in the other row. All screws in the same row are insulated from each other by non-conducting barriers.
- to link 5 black wires into one: On the top row, fasten each black wire to the first 5 screws. On the bottom row, use either a jumper strip or a piece of bare wire to link the first 5 screws. Take the feed to the power pack from one of the 5 linked screws on the bottom row.
- Radio Shack has (at least used to have) thin metal jumper strips that link 8 screws on their screw terminal blocks together. Miniatronics should make them for your barrier strips (another name for screw terminal blocks) as well. If you don't want to link 8 screws together, you cut the jumper strip to just the number of screws you want to link.
- I usually use a separate terminal strip for each color wire/polarity, and use the full length jumper. That way, I can add as many wires as I have screws, and have them all tied together.
yours in wiring
Fred W
I recently bought a miniatronics Terminal Block, 10 Screw. I thought I knew what it was in the hobby shop, but when I got it all wired in, I think I did it wrong. Can someone please tell me what I am doing wrong? I am working on a n scale dc setup. Lets say that the zero's under the text is the terminal block. I am trying to connect all my terminal joiners so that I only have one set of wires running to my transformer. I thought the first row would be for the black wires and the second row would be for the red wires. Then I would run a single black and a single red to my transformer. After hooking it up, I realized it did not work. After further inspection of the block, I noticed that the screws that were across from each other were connected by a metal plate. The guy at the shop said that all I needed to do was pop out the metal plate, but I don't see how this would change anything.
Can someone please help me, I am not sure what to do. I thought I would use this block so that I would not need to solder all the wires together.
Thanks for the help.
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0