As I get older and do less and less "stuff" I find I am reluctant to buy a tool for longevity if I can buy one that will do. I crimp stuff so infrequently now that $20 is just what I want to spend - but if it doesn't even do the job in the short run I'll return it and spring for a unit with much longer handles.
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Maybe I was lucky.
My arthritis was in my knees and they just put new ones in.
I don't know what I'd do if I lost the ability to use my crimper.
I don't know if the ratchet will be enough compensation but a well designed one guarantees a good crimp. They're also nice for positioning in tight places. I used to build panels and with a T&B crimper you could close the dies just enough to hold the terminal and get it in place without the juggling act of dropping the terminal if your grip relaxed a little.
I hope the S&G works out for you. A T&B ratchet is literally 10 times that price.
If you're like me, having the terminal lightly held in the ratcheting cromper while you manuever the handles with be worth the 20. Every time I try something like that I wish I had another pair of hands.
I'm not a big Harbor Freight fan but I bought an electric impact wrench for another job that saved my butt with one of those deals. If I absolutely have to have a tire shop put a tire on, the first thing I do when I get home is take it off and put it back on with the breaker bar I carry and a reasonable torque. My educated fingers say I use about 80 ft-lbs and I've never had a tire fall off.
Especially when the ones you've got are failure prone. Today I dropped my favorite pair of tweezers on the tile floor, mangling the tip beyond repair. It just "jumped" out of my hand. )-:
We'll see. It should arrive by Friday and I still have some crimping to do. Some of the nicer crimpers were $250 and above - a cost my low volume crimping could not justify. My only fear is that even with the ratchet, the handles are too short to develop the leverage I need. The articulated crimpers I saw for $60 only did large cables from 12 to 4 gauge. My work is with 22 to 12 gauge wires. Probably wouldn't work so well . . . (-:
You can't take it with ya.
There's no wrist replacement surgery I know of. Docs say clearances are so tight that surgery can make things worse because there's very little room for scar tissue to form without impeding function.
Most of the orthos say (of my case) it's cumulative wear and tear and the price of typing at 120wpm for many years. They say they are seeing similar problems at much earlier ages in kids that play video games 16 hours a ay. )-; I think learning how to type advanced my career more than playing "Call of Duty" will advance that of my teenage neighbor.
Good luck. I understand they are getting better at those. My ex-boss had a THR gone bad and when they do, it's hell on wheels. Sort of. (-:
Speaking of "lost" and "crimper" that's exactly what UPS did to mine. Supposed to arrive Thurday so I check the UPS website where it say "damaged in transit." I check with Amazon who tells me "package refused by customer(!!!)" I tell the Amazon guy that's a little bogus because for as long as I have used Amazon, I've only had to sign for multi-hundred dollar items like TV's.
He goes offline, does some checking, goes to UPS and reads that the driver found just an empty box in the back of the truck and sent that back to Amazon. And Amazon never said boo about the package being returned in email. Shades of the Malaysian government.
A new one should arrive on Monday. I got an extra free month of Prime service, too, but it may turn around to bite me in the end because I was scheduled to renew at the old rate and this could trigger renewal at the more expensive $100 rate. Shoprunner, suspecting Amazon Prime's price increase will incense many customers, offered a nice freebee to steal Amazon customers:
BTW, what you do if arthritis hits your hands is every few days, when it gets bad, you go into the read-only mode. Been doing that a lot and I hate it. I also hijacked the old crock pot and use it to make a melted paraffin bath. Alternate soaks in paraffin and ice water sometimes does wonders and other times, nothing.
Got Dragon Dictate to compensate but it's only so-so, I can't watch TV while I type, etc. It misreads what I said often enough to make it a real pain. I am considering an iPhone because it does pretty well with voice recognition and the newer models allege to be designed to be health monitors, too.
Today I got a replacement external USB DVD burner to replace one that's developed an ejection problem. Before arthritis I would have taken it apart on the bench to find out what the problem was (dirt/grease is my guess). Instead, I went to Ebay, punched in my model number, found a nearly identical drive with very little use (looked and *was* much newer than mine because it's got Lightscribe) and swapped it in. Total cost, including shipping, was $20. I can finally use the Lightscribe disks I won at a product demo 5 years ago!
It 'burns' me to spend even that much if I could fix it easily, but at least I can do it at my leisure now and have a still mostly operation spare (it ejects from Explorer, just not the front button).
One funny note to all this, the DVD drive came earlier than expected and on the day the crimpers should have (having one powerful deja vu at the moment that I wrote this all before!). So when I picked up the package that I thought the crimpers were in, it was insanely heavy for a pair of crimpers and I thought "this tool is so heavy I might not even be able to lift it." Turns out it was an external DVD drive, not a crimper.
I still fear that the ratcheting mechanism might not be enough to compensate for weakened hands. We'll see. On Monday. If UPS doesn't bugger it up again. (Actually I suspect the real cause was poor packaging by Amazon, but since I never actually saw the package or wreckage of it, I'll probably never know.)
Ah, but one of the biggest reasons I have any money at all to spend at 60+ is that I always tried to pay as little as the job at hand required for something. Sometimes that's false economy, as when you have to "buy it again" but most times it works out.
Around 2005 I bought 4 Emprex 32" LCD TVs for $300 each, about half the going rate at the time. They turned out to be great investments and though two have failed, it's almost certain it's from bad caps in the power supply. It happened after they gave years of daily service, too.
I dunno about you, but if I can buy something for $300 that normally sells for two or three times that amount and end up being satisfied with its performance, I am a happy camper. I buy a lot of factory refurbs, too, and have always gotten excellent results (Samsung HD camera, Sony stand-alone DVD recorder, Sansa MP3 players, Vizio PC monitor/TV combo, etc).
I bought some repair kits with high quality replacement caps and when I finally clear enough bench space, I will try to revive the two TV's that have gone dark. Unlike a DVD burner that cost $80 new and $20 used, a $300 TV is worth a little repair effort and pain in the hand. My friend with a same sized Mitsubishi had his die a month out of warranty which made me feel even better about my purchase (is that schadenfreude?).
So, given how often I use crimpers (once a month?) I can't see buying the top of the line model *unless* nothing else will do the job for me. That's still a possibility, but we're not there yet.
Well, my S&G Tool Aid 18900 Professional Ratcheting Terminal Crimper ($19.88) from Amazon arrived after a few delivery issues were resolved.
The tool is hefty. The head is made out of laminations of black steel (5 layers inside 1/2" wide jaws) and appears to be very sturdy. It provides a very well-defined double crimping "bite" - clearly much better than the cheapies that come with kits of connectors.
I loaded it up, squeezed away and got the connector stuck in the jaws and couldn't free it. There's a tiny triangular tab on the ratchet that needs to be "popped" to release the jaws, but I couldn't reach it (it's between the handles). Turns out that my hands weren't quite strong enough to close the jaws tight enough to trigger the automatic ratchet release. The articulation of the outer handle provides a lot more leverage than the standard single-pivot point crimpers, but it isn't as much as I had hoped.
After playing with it for a while, I discovered I *could* squeeze the handles hard enough to make a good crimp. (Strangely it's not a question of force, but steady force over time - the mechanism operates best with a slow, steady squeeze.) The ratchet mechanism make a perfect crimp every time. Once I got the hang of it, I was able to make good crimps. The handles are shaped to allow 3/4" pipe to slip perfectly over them when I get to the point I need even more leverage than I get now. For $20 I am pretty happy. I can make much better crimps than before because of the dual "bite" of the laminated crimping jaws. Thanks to Ralph Mowrey who first pointed me to the ratcheting style of crimper on Ebay. I tend to buy stuff like this on Amazon because of their rating system. This tool had a high number of "perfect" marks and the few negatives weren't really deserved.
The fact that you can feel the ratchet lock release once a good crimp has been made makes it a lot easier to deal with than other crimpers. You don't end up applying too much force and hurting your hands. The crimper is also small enough to work in tight spaces, and that's important for the things I use crimpers for. It makes amazingly strong crimps. I was testing their strength by trying to pull a wire out of one and the wire broke instead of pulling out.
Good work folks, and thanks to all that contributed. The only thing I regret now is how long it took to buy the right darn tool for the job. I can't believe how many years I put up with those plier-type single pivot cheapies. I am comtemplating redoing all the crimped connections I have around the house with the new crimpers since they are that much better than my old arthritic attempts with the cheap tool.
Yup, that's why they're favored for production work. Your crew might be a little worse for wear on Monday morning but the crimps will be the same as always. Glad it worked for you.
Glad the crimpers worked for you. They fource you to make a perfect crimp if you strip the wires correctly.
While I don't have trouble with the single piviot T&B tool and have used it to make many crimps, the ratching action does work beter for me.
It still requires some attention to detail to get it right but it's so much more positive and less painful than the "squeeze until you think you squeezed enough" sort of crimpers. I have been trying to think of a similar tool where I would say to anyone looking for advice to "get the one with the magic" and that would be the ratchet in this case.
I think the weed burner (ice melter) is a good example. I should move it to the HF thread but . . .
I had a choice of a propane weedburner from HF for $20 but when I got to the store the one with a built-in piezo-electric lighter was on sale for $5 more. So I made the big leap to the higher priced unit. (I use it for clearing ice from the north-facing brick steps at which it excels.) Having a push button lighter built-in, especially when wearing gloves in windy wintry weather, is worth the $5 and then some. I wouldn't recommend anyone buy one without a built in "sparker." Or buy a non-ratchet crimper. All this talk is giving me a hankering to do more crimping!
Pretty much (although I cut one wire too short and no amount of crimping was going to help that - I suppose a male/female disconnect but obviously the solution was to save the scrap and redo the cutting).
But Lord almighty the ratchet crimper does the job first time every time if you manage to get the wire through the hole right that is. I already crimped an empty connector in a tight space where I couldn't see the wire had popped.
This gives me an excuse to redo all the 12vdc crimps I've done because they are so much more positive than the old single "tooth" crimpers. Besides, since I started crimping I've learned to use adhesive lined heat shrink around such connections (two layers!) to add some extra mechanical strength so that any tension on the connector is at least partially absorbed by the shrink-tube reinforcement. Plus it keeps them waterproof.
Most importantly in my desire to play with my new toy, I discovered how many crappy crimps I had entered into service because I didn't know what a good crimp should look like. I suppose I should take pictures. I should be ashamed to admit this but the crimp "blanks" are all color coded and I never noticed before. D'oh. Anyway, the new tool has caused a wave of maintenance to occur on cables that got less notice than they should. A double blessing, sort of!
I envy your handstrength. The big plus here is that the crimpers oddly feel almost hydraulic in nature. The last part of the squeeze seems effortless compared to the midrange effort, as if some stored force is creating the crimp. It's very odd. Maybe it's because once the resistance to the deformation of the circular end of crimp occurs and it become elliptical. That shapes means crushing it the rest of the way requires less force. With the T&B (??) type tool I never knew how much pressure was enough. Now I can be sure when the ratchet releases, the deal is done. The lessening force to squeeze the crimpers almost acts as a shock absorber when the crimp is complete.
Note to Joe Taxpayer: $20 got me *more* than enough "bang for my buck." Far more than I expected although there was a moment that I thought "this isn't any better than what I am using." After only a little more experimentation I realized this was *way* better than what I have been using. So much so, I am going to redo a lot of old suspect crimps (if only for inspection purposes). I am leaving instructions for it to be buried with me. (-:
The same thing happened when I got my Snap'N'Seal coaxial crimper for waterproof connectors, mostly for cable TV. All of the old hex crimps (and worse, twist on connectors!) came off and were replaced by the S&S connectors because the technology and the quality of the crimp were so superior - if, as Ralph says, you cut the wire right. (-: Took me a while to figure out how to strip the wire for Snap'N'Seal connectors (and that different brands required different prep) but I got there eventually.
I let someone borrow my perfectly aligned, three level RG-6QS stripper and he ran it backwards and it never stripped correctly again. )-: It was another miracle tool. If you just made the tool end flush with the end of the cable and it would strip outer jacket, inner shield and center cable in one quick "clockwise" whoosh. I still mourn its loss and haven't been able to find a suitable replacement. Don't lend out your tools.
Is crimping your hobby, or do you do it for a living?
I hope you won't feel you wasted 20 dollars when I tell you this, but there is a drug in final trials that should be on the market soon that should relieve the problem you've had.
You need to take it 3 hours before crimping. I think it's called Crimpagra.
Is crimping some sort of euphemism?
Sorry, crimping's just crimping. Adding little quick disconnects and spade lugs to the end of various wires.
I'd guess that trying to light the stupid thing in the cold would really make it clear that the sparker is worth the five bucks. Sadly, we on this list have been sternly told in ALL CAPS not to buy any thing at Harbor Freight. You're such a rebel, renegade, scofflaw. Last of the wild mustangs on the prarie, for sure.
Everyone around you will be amazed, rock hard crimps, and you can keep going for hours? Call your doctor if you're crimping for more than four hours.
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