I am strongly in favor of having a standard connector for powering everything in the shack, not only for the sake of EMCOMM deployment, but also to avoid having a rat’s nest of proprietary connectors strewn behind the operating desk. Consequently, whenever I build something, I include power pole connectors (see, for example, the NESCAF filter project). The quick and dirty way is to poke a hole in the box and run a power cable out for some length and then crimp on the power pole shells. This works okay, but is not all that neat. What I’d really like to do is mount the connector right on the box. That way, any power pole patch cord could run between the device and a power distribution strip.
Unfortunately, there is no reasonable way to mount a single power pole connector on a panel. There is a nice snap-in connector for two pairs of power poles, but if you want just one pair, which surely must be the most common configuration, there is no ready-made piece that will snap into a hole.
The only option offered commercially is slightly insane: a pair of aluminum brackets that trap the connectors above and below. Each bracket is held in place by a single screw hole, which gives them some tendency to rotate on the screw, although the plastic shells themselves more or less wedge everything into position when both screws are tightened down. To make this solution work, a rectangular hole must be machined into the panel and then screw holes must be drilled at the right spot. Worst of all, these little clips sell for an insulting $2.49 per pair.
As mentioned in the user comments on the powerwerx website, it’s crazy that no one, much less the primary retailer, has offered a product to make this easier. The obvious product would inset the pair of connectors into a round holder, so that the pair could be installed and perhaps screwed into place by drilling one large hole for the assembly. If ever there were a product that needed 3D printing, it would be a panel mount adapter for power pole connectors.
Alas, having no 3D printer, nor for that matter any tools that were really appropriate for the job, I went the primitive route and made my own power pole brackets out of aluminum. I had recently built a couple projects in plastic Radio Shack project boxes that come with both an aluminum and plastic cover. I had opted to use the plastic cover, which left me with a spare aluminum one, which measured out as 19 gauge. I don’t have a sheer, and this is a bit much for my aviation snips, so I made some measurements, scratched out the lines with an awl, and traced over the lines with a cutting wheel mounted on a dremel. I didn’t cut all the way through, but scored the aluminum deeply enough that it snapped on the lines with a bend back and forth. I then went over the edges with a sanding wheel to take off the burrs and smoothen the corners.
Working from one of the real brackets, I measured the dimensions to the neared 64th of an inch. I’d prefer metric, but I have the impression that it was originally laid out in imperial units, so I stuck to those. Luckily, the two cut-outs for the power pole shells are 1/4″ each, which is exactly the size of my nibbler. Two nibbles were enough to make the cut-outs deep enough, and nicely square.
Finally, I drilled a hole for the mounting screw and made sure that the brackets would actually fit correctly over a pair of power pole plugs. The brackets are not as uniform as those rolling off an assembly line, but the price (and availability) are right. Since they are all a bit different, when making an actual project, I’d drill and file the rectangle for power pole pair and then fit the brackets around them into final position in order to mark the exact location of each drill hole.