RJ45 corroding/oxidising after crimping

th558 · 2022-09-06T21:45:05+00:00

A couple weeks ago I made my first ethernet cable. All seemed fine till I had a look at the connectors about a week later and noticed that something didn't look right. The gold plated pins didn't look like they originally did. The pictures below show a random pre-made cable I had lying around (top), The cable I crimped myself (middle) and the connector on it's own (bottom). As you can see the bare connector looks fine as it should but the crimped one has noticeable oxidation after a few days. Depending on the camera/light angle it can look anywhere from minor to pretty bad. In person I definitely can see the difference compared to the connector before crimping. I'm not sure what is causing this. It was stored indoors for a few days and not used. Could the crimping tool have damaged the gold plating causing it to oxidise fast? The connector I used costs about £2 for 10 so fairly cheap and the crimping tool was about £12. Here are links to both. Are the connectors or crimper to blame? The cable works fine but I'm worried that it could cause issues later on. I don't mind buying new connectors but I'm not spending £40-50 on a crimper which I'm only gonna use for one job. RJ45 Connectors Crimping Tool