6 Gauge Crimper From Bolt Cutters

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by dtengineering

And while I agree with most of the arguments on why one should not crimp AND solder, I'll suggest that those considerations primarily come into play over an extended period of time. The primary risk to an FRC robot, from my point of view, was that an improperly crimped connection would come loose, not that a crimped and soldered connection would fatigue.

Consider the battery connections. They typically get used for multiple seasons, and they get a lot of flexing. I have seen at least a dozen cases where the wires broke at the entrance to the crimp, and the vast majority of them were obviously due to having been soldered and destroying the wires' flexibility. (The others were apparently from someone having intentionally bent the wires hard to make things fit, instead of putting the battery in the proper orientation or assembling the lugs to point in the desired direction in the first place.)