A frequent question we receive here at DigiKey is whether a given male pin contact will mate with a given female socket contact, or to find the mating contact for an existing pin or socket.
Unfortunately, this isn’t really how this product type works. Contacts are not intended or designed to mate with each other outside of the housings they are used in. “What is the mate for this contact?” isn’t the right question; “What is the mate for the housing I’m using this contact in?” is the right question.
Sometimes however, you are given nothing but a contact part number and told to figure it out. Don’t lose hope! DigiKey’s website makes it fairly simple to work backwards from just a contact part number in most cases; let’s use the above depicted contact as an example.
Say you’re given the part number 0002081002, for a 14-20AWG MLX -socket contact, and told to get the rest of the connector system with no other information. How would you go about this using DigiKey’s website? In this case, you can scroll down the product page for the contact until you find the “For Use With” section towards the bottom, shown here:
Here you will find the housings this contact is recommended to be used with, and can select whichever one you need based on the requirements of your project. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll assume we need the first housing shown in this image, Molex part number 0050841030. Clicking on the red “Details” button (or anywhere on the image) brings you to the product page for that housing, as linked above.
From that housing’s product page, we can scroll down again until we find a section towards the bottom of the page called “Mating Products.” This will show all the verified mates available for your chosen housing, and allow you to select whichever one fits your needs.
For the purposes of demonstration, let’s use 0050842030 as our choice of mate and click on the red “Details” button again to bring us to that mating housing’s product page. From there, we can do the same trick once more - scroll down to the bottom of the device’s product page and look for the section called “Associated Product.” It will look something like this:
From here, we select a contact that will fit our needs. Keep these guidelines in mind when selecting a contact:
- Pin contacts always mate with socket contacts - pins don’t mate with pins and sockets don’t mate with sockets.
- Tab contacts, which you’ll find sometimes for power connections, mate with either sockets or receptacles, depending on what terminology the manufacturer uses
- Match the plating type used on your contacts - gold mates to gold, and tin mates to tin. Mixing contact plating can result in gremlins that are difficult to diagnose.
- Make sure you use the correct wire gauge for your project. Matching AWG ranges is a good start, but sometimes you’ll have to ask for the precise AWG being used to determine where you can use dissimilar ranges, such as 14-20AWG and 18-26AWG.
- Beware! Some connector series, such as our example MLX series products, can use pins or sockets in either gender of housing. If you already have a socket, such as the 0002081002 we started with, make sure you select a pin contact, and vice versa.
In this case, 0002082004 would be the contact to select for our original goal of "find the mating pin for 0002081002. It hits all the criteria - pin to sopcket, matching AWG range and plating. Bingo! Mission complete - and we have the housings we need to make them work, to boot.
A final caution: avoid trying to use these products “standalone”, without housings, if at all possible. Some folks try and do so for testing, prototyping, or various maker chicanery under the assumption they can save space/cost by forgoing the housings and simply relying on the contacts to mate. That is not how these products are designed; reliable electrical contact/continuity cannot be guaranteed without their housings, and they also have no means of retention between each other. If you must do so for whichever reason, be aware that this is not at all an intended use. You should test your solution as thoroughly as you can, and try to account for the deficiencies of contacts mating without housings to position them correctly and retain mating alignment.