Our teams beloved harbor freight 4awg hydraulic crimper appears to be wearing out. The hex pattern of the dye isn’t crisp in the copper. Further, when we use it for SB50 connections there have always been broad flashing left on the contact that I have been filing off in order to physically fit into the connectors.
We also have recently had trouble with aligning the angle of the crimp to the angle of the contact tongue, resulting in contacts that don’t sit flat across the spring and eventually back out of the housing / start failing tug tests. Lost a quals match to this issue Saturday morning and missed SVR playoffs (it was our second did-not-operate of the weekend after tangling our intake on the field on Friday).
So… I’m in the market for a crimp tool that’s:
-designed for 4awg contacts
-solid crimp results verified by cross sectioning
-controls for contact alignment.
Bonus if it trims its own flashing
What are reasonably affordable tools teams have been using for this with success? We paid $40 for our hydraulic crimper 6 years ago, this time around I’m willing to invest a couple hundred. I realize I may still not have the budget for an auto trimming tool in this range, and am definitely open to community feedback that I just need to invest in quality control training for Operator Skill Issues rather than invest in better tooling.
The crimper shipped with spare seals, so rebuilding the hydraulics to see if that fixes the crisp corners is also an option. 6 years and ~300 cycles is pretty good, I’d be happy to get another few years out of a rebuild.