ORIGINAL: Campgems
Guys, I hate to rain on the prade, but 40 years of working with pluging cables in computers tells me it isn't a good idea. There are two issues you have to contend with. First is pin alignment. Four pins is one thing, but 24 pins starts to be come a real issue on a home brew connector. The second is pluging force. This is the real rain. With four pins it may require a few pounds of push to get the connector home. Now with six connectors, you could easly end up requiring 20 to 30 pounds of force to push the pins home. The pins on the receiver are just standard .100 spaced pins. The circuit board doesn't have much strength and trying to push home that many pins at once could eaisly crack a board.
A DB25 connector would be a better method, but you are going to add five or six ozs of weight, and you will have to solder leads to the connector, giveing a failure point for flexing wires.
I don't like pluging and unpluging wires on a receiver. Each pluging and unpluging wears some of the gold or tin plating off the pins and conectors. I use a pigtail of two short servo extentions to my aileron and a second set in the wings. The added number of connections could be a problem, but it is less a problem than the wear issue. I now have to sacurficial cables that when they get tired, it only takes a small investment to replace them. My one 4*60 had the aileron cables plugged and unpluged enough times that the "snap" had gone out of the pluging. Time for a new set when that happens.
What would be best is a Zif (zero insersion force) connector, one that is rated for several hundred insertions.
Don
It would be best to have one part of the harness that stays connected to the radio and an interface connector that it plugs into which contains the connectors for each servo so nothing that is fragile or expensive is the make break part of the arrangement. That would be far cheaper than going with a zif connector and you just have an interface connector for each plane with the common jumper connector that stays with the RX. The interface is nothing more than a pcb header with pins for the servos that goes to, and an amp or molex type for the make/brake that plugs into the radio pigtail. You are right the PCB of the RX would take a lot of abuse if you were all ways swapping it out but if you had a pigtail just replace it. That way the replaceable pigtail lead takes all of the beating and you can replace it.
As far as your observation about the force required, I doubt that it would be 30 lbs for 6 connectors (I swapped out a lot of chips in my day also, long before zif's and smt)...