I’m a man who loves standards. Especially open standards. They’re basically free rights to manufacture interoperable components for use in large and complex systems.

I have a rather nice laptop charger and it just so happens to use the XT60 connector. Unfortunately I noticed one day that the XT60 connector on my laptop charger was a little loose. Maybe even more than a little loose. I only noticed this because my laptop said it was about to die, which is really unusual for a laptop that’s plugged into the wall.

My first attempt at a fix fell on kapton tape. I used two layers of kapton tape around the female end of the connector. It wasn’t bad, and I’m going to leave it, but in no way did it fix my issue. So the next thing I did was google “Fix loose XT60 connector”, which landed me on one of those stereotypical youtube videos where you hate what you’re seeing but you sit through it anyways until they get to the good bits.

So I’m going to save you the annoyance and heartache. Just take the male connector on your XT60 pair and splay the quad “fork” part of the connector with something like a glasses screwdriver or a ballpoint pen. Don’t go ham, just try to open the connector up, as it’s probably squished. So I did that, and it worked freaking perfectly. I wasn’t sure exactly how I felt about the XT60 connector at first, but honestly I think it’s not bad. It’s simple, and I love simplicity.

In any case, just figured I’d throw this out for anyone with XT60 heartburn.