Webster Art

I love my little purple .5 Linkcam. It’s the perfect panic cam for finger cracks. But I broke the trigger wire two years ago and then Omega went out of business. I also had a booty BD Ultralight with a broken trigger wire. Normal cams are easy. I can do them at the picnic table with weed wacker plastic string. All I need is a stove to melt the plastic. That solution has been around for 10 years.

But Linkcams and Ultralights are much harder due to proprietary connectors and ultra thin wires. I bought some 1/24″ stainless braided wire and a crimper tool with assorted crimping sleeves.

I also bought some specialty wire:

I did the Ultralight first because it was easier. First step was to put the old crimps in the vice and grind them off with my rasp file. The solid wire that pins into the cam lobes is half the thickness of the normal cams…which is why they had to wrap it in rubber…but they break just as easy.

I tried to simply bend a bight and stick it into the trigger bar, but I’d used thicker more durable braided cable and it wouldn’t fit into the retaining pinch. So I had to manually weave one end at a time into the trigger bar…that worked great.

You can see the skinny solid wires here. Notice how I’ve carefully guessed at where in the ‘throw travel’ the trigger bar needs to be buttoned down, then cut the wires with enough overlap for the crimp sleeve.

Crimping the swage.

I had a really hard time holding the squirrely wires, swages (sleeves) and braided cable in alignment with the cam lobes and trigger bar. Later my wife gave me a second pair of hands, but this ‘third hand’ soldering tool helped hold it all in place for the crimping.

The linkcam was a bugger. They use proprietary pressed in connectors. I was unable to press out the pins in the lobes. Instead I used Dremel wheel to grind off the old eyebolt style cable connector. Then I fabricated a new one using a drill and a metal hole puncher…and some jewelers files. I put a tapering slot into it like you find on the back of smoke alarms that need to be mounted on a flat head screw on the wall. I figured I could simply crimp the “arm” on my new eyebolt to the new cable, then crimp the new cable to the original cable. My work is never pretty. If I can get it functional it’s a good day.

Because the cam lobes need spring tension, it was difficult to guess at how many turns I needed to rotate the cam lobe to get it back to manufacturers spec. I went with two turns from the relaxed state and compared that with the working side. The tension seems to be holding my slotted eyebolt in place so far.