It’s my feeling that nothing like that is going to beat drilling/cutting/abrading a hole through the enclosure (wear PPE for breathing) and putting your connector of choice through the wall, and epoxying it there.
As far as cable glands and related items, they aren’t very water resistant. Maybe a light small-volume splash once. To really make cable glands work well you need to seal them with butyl tape and in that case you could simply ditch the cable gland and just use butyl tape.
If you’re getting them for looks and appearance reasons, then go for it, but I wouldn’t recommend cable glands for water resist purposes.
The good news is that on a fiberglass enclosure, epoxy adheres to cut edges fucking fantastically because it’s already an epoxy-based composite that will have tons of microscopic fibers sticking out of the cut edge.
On a metal enclosures it sticks great.
On an ABS enclosure you should lightly sand around the hole, use a flex epoxy like West System 650 (it’s not very flexible, but not rock hard like most) and don’t extend the epoxy bead more than about 4mm from the connector. Use a toothpick. You can also put some butyl tape on the inside on the ABS version just in case it flexes and pops the epoxy off. This is rare but possible.
For best results, mix epoxy for an amount of time until you think it’s mixed well enough, then mix it for that much longer after that. It will seem excessive and tedious, but it needs to be completely mixed to work the best. Scrape the sides of the container occasionally while mixing.
Tell me where I’m wrong here. With an XT90/MR60/MT60 connector epoxied into the enclosure wall, you’ve got (let’s assume) a perfect seal against the connector. But none of the Amass connectors I’ve seen are IP rated against water ingress, or even marketed as. Depending on which gender connector you’re epoxying, you have small or (relatively) large holes in/around the pins.
Vs an IP65 rated cable gland like these: McMasterCarr Wet-Location Multi-Cord Grips, with a rubber o-ring and internal grommet, that are specifically designed for this scenario. No butyl tape required if you’re mounting on a good, flat surface.
If I was planning to ride in the wet and wanted full piece of mind (which I am), I’d go for a commercial, off-the-shelf solution that was tested and rated to an adequate IP level.
You’re not wrong. If you epoxy the male (with the pins, not the holes) Amass connectors through the enclosure, you simply use a toothpick put a tiny epoxy on that little hole.
For the male XT90 connectors, take a tiny, tiny piece of paper, drag it through epoxy, and stick it to the back of the connector between the solder posts. Cut off the dry part sticking out after it cures.
Fair fair, so you can seal Amass connectors. Then you’ve got to do something to stop them from ever (potentially) vibrating loose, which is a disadvantage cable glands don’t have.
Use cable glands for a few years, ride in the rain occasionally, and then maybe you can come back and be better at articulating why the next person shouldn’t use them.
The main reason it works better is because epoxy is a liquid, and the liquid is endlessly adaptable to what you are working on, and to waterproof all the stuffs.
The cable glands ship as a solid, and thus all the pieces must fall into place perfectly, which rarely if ever happens in practice. Even tugging on the wire or bouncing around can cause opportunites for ingress.
Using a liquid solution seems to work a lot better than a solid solution.
Likewise, butyl tape is a very malleable solid… so it works well imho.
The biggest benefit to cable glands IMO is the fact that they’re not permanent. If your motor breaks or something, you can loosen it and pull it out, and tighten it back up when the new motor and wires are in place. Meanwhile trying to pull a cable epoxied to the enclosure is going to be a bad time and most likely a destructive process, making it harder to wire the new one in and keep it watertight.
Eh I’ve had connectors ripped out before and you can’t zip tie them together when it goes through an enclosure, glands provide a physical clamp on the cable which helps significantly with stresses. If there’s such things as an affordable waterproof locking connector that can handle the amps while being as low profile as an XT90 I’d use them though.
