Last night I worked with 3 students to troubleshoot a problem with our practice robot. Part of the problem was either rushed or novice electrical work on the practice robot, which is understandable if they never learned properly.
Since I wanted them to learn, I made them redo it. Another problem became apparent almost immediately, our electrical tools are in a bad state and our students need training.
When I asked them to cut and strip a wire, they grabbed this type of tool (for some reason we have 4-5 pairs of these ::ouch:: ): https://www.amazon.com/Greenlee-1161-Adjustable-Fiber-Jacket-Stripper/dp/B0007W6JYC/
I was able to find our 1 multi-tool to show them how that tool will nick or cut the strands of copper, and why that’s undesirable.
Searching through old threads, I’ve found quite a few generic “what tools should we have for a new team”, but I’d like to focus on nicer to have electrical tools. Specifically, if you had the Cadillac of an electrical tool kit, what would be in it?
Points of consideration:
Where did you buy your tool, or is there a specific brand you trust?
Would you recommend a preferred multi-tool (cut, strip, crimp all in one)?
What about just wire stripping for wiring an entire robot drive train?
Would you use a dedicated wire cutting tool?
Self-Adjusting Wire Stripper or Wire Stripping Pliers?
Is there a favorite crimping tool?
Recommended soldering iron?
Which of these do you bring to competition, what do you leave at home?
2nd part of the discussion, do you have any type of system in place for protecting your electrical tools from novice abuse? How often do you have to replace a tool?
We buy from McMaster because of their customer service, fast shipping, and good products.
Multi-tools compromise somewhere. I don’t want compromises in my electrical system. Skip them.
We’ve been setting up our electrical supplies for the last two years with nice tools and consumables.
Get a few different sized wire cutters. Side-cuts work well for 16AWG and smaller, Lineman’s pliers for 14-10awg, and curved cutters for 6awg.
Never had good luck with self-adjusting wire strippers, do not recommend.
Non-insulated terminal crimpers. I prefer to use non-insulated terminals. As brands change the insulation thickness changes, which will impact the crimp performance significantly. Non-insulated terminals don’t suffer like insulated terminals do in this regard. We always insulate with electrical tape or (ideally) heat shrink, which keeps the termination together robustly and has a smaller form factor than insulated terminals. Plus they are cheap! We use a hammer crimper for 6awg terminals and have had great success with it. We’ve sectioned terminations made with our hammer crimper to find solid cold-welding of the copper strands to each other and the terminal and load-tested them to ~300lbf pullout strength.
I highly recommend getting a couple of these for stripping wire. You’ll never go back to any other way.
We have an old analogue Hakko soldering iron rather than the new fancy digital one, but it works great after many years. (Being able to go up to 900 F is fantastic for soldering 6 AWG wire.)
That Klein stripper looks like the way to to. At home, I use the awful one shown in the original post…but I’ve been using that style for about 45 years, so I’ve finally got the hang of it. And I use a crimper that is not a multi tool, but it is also not specifically made for insulated terminals…yet it crimps very well.
At school…the electrical folks usually use a multi tool to strip, or a smaller “sized” stripper. And I finally got them to use the same type crimper that I use at home
As usual, the tools are not quite as important as the training. Skilled workers can do a decent job with lousy tools, but an unskilled worker can mess up the job with the best of tools. The best bet is decent tools, and good training. No need to go crazy on the tools, though.
2nd part of the discussion, do you have any type of system in place for protecting your electrical tools from novice abuse? How often do you have to replace a tool? **We have a specific electrical tools cabinet separate from the main tool cabinet. I try to stay away from replacing a tool for about 4-5 years if I can get away with it unless we receive a voucher. **
One of the tools my team has that is very useful (in the right hands) is this sort of adjustable wire stripper:
If you set it correctly, it makes stripping lots a particular wire size very quick and easy. Unfortunately, similar to the basic wire strippers I linked above (which also have an adjustment), students on my team don’t seem to use the stopper. Which is very frustrating.
Thanks for all the links so far. Interesting to see people’s preferences.
In terms of measuring equipment, you can’t go wrong with Fluke. They’ve been on top of the electrical instrumentation world since 1953. We love our Fluke 115 we got in FIRST Choice, and they also give away the 117 to FIRST teams in FIRST Choice.
I am going to third (or fourth) the Katapult style wire strippers, love the auto adjusting capability of them.
I’m a big fan of the the Eclipse Pro’sKit Ergo crimpers, you can get them with Anderson Power Pole crimps but can get many other die sets which allow you to do insulated terminals and PWM crimps with the same crimper. They are similar to the West Mountain Radio crimpers that are referred on older CD threads.
Brady makes my favorite wire labeler, but the cartridge refills are expensive:
Also, if you absolutely have to, you can take a screwdriver and bend it in the form of a normal wago instead of purchasing one. I also find it helpful to have a good pair of wire cutters around as well.
We just purchased a Hakko-FX888D and it is one of the best purchases made on our team. There are better versions of it but it’s great for FRC teams. Extremely fast warmup times and lots of settings. Xcelite makes good wire strippers that you can set depth. I use those at work. Definitely get a good kit of ferrules and a heat gun with some heatshrink. Label your wires to make troubleshooting easier. And make clean wiring using sleepving, zip ties, and cable tie anchors from McMaster (or anywhere else).
What size labels are you using?
One thing I really want my team to do is label their wiring to a schematic. I’ve used Brady at work in the past (lots of lamacoids, some wire labeling). I’m actually really surprised the handheld unit costs less than $100…
The TechHOUNDS are big on Anderson connectors, so that’s at the top of the list. The generic crimping tool should be able to handle most everything else.
We haven’t used Ferrules before, but I’m a big fan of the idea. The die sets in the generic crimping tool included a ferrule crimper, however I’d rather have a dedicated tool.
I originally thought I wouldn’t need to crimp battery wire, that the team stopped using crimps. Turns out I was wrong, and a student was trying to crimp the battery terminal with a cheap pair of 10-12-14 gauge crimps…
I didn’t purchase (since the team already owns) but I highly recommend wire strippers similar to these: Adjustable Wire Stripping Pliers
Which works extremely well when stripping a bunch of 1 size wire.
I’m in love with the Brady Labeler… if only we had this sooner. The only drawback is the labels aren’t cheap, about $2.35 / foot. If you create a detailed schematic of the robot, and keep everything terse, the cost-benefit is a no brainer.
The solder kit is nice in that it comes with a case to keep everything together, but the individual components are super cheap (i’m probably going to throw away the vacuum pump. I’d highly recommend buying items in the kit separately and assembling it yourself.
*The bag is a little small, and can almost hold everything. Everything listed here but the solder kit fits in the bag, if I were to buy again I’d go just a little bit bigger.
Another item I considered but didn’t buy was a mini heat gun. It would be nice to have that in the electrical bag though.
I’ve had fairly good luck with using this style of wire stripper, I’ve never had experience with the particular one I linked but I have had with very similar ones. These allow you to set how much of the insulation you want stripped off each time which is super helpful for stripping wires for crimps. Also being able to take the insulation off of 4 or 5 can or pwm wires at the same time is really nice. The pair I have was about $80 but im sure you can find them a little cheaper.
We have had good success teaching freshmen to properly:
clean-cut the wires to length,
strip all gauges up to 10AWG and then
use the crimper in the handle to make a clean button of a crimp on the top of the connectors.
Then, we mercilessly hold the connector in one hand and the wire in the other and give a good, smooth tug to make sure the crimp is good (boy is that a source of competitive pride when it holds well!)
After that, we teach them to properly wrap the .5 to 1 inch from the metal connector back to the wire with the correspondingly colored electrical-tape with a nice, angled, tight wrap.
We repeat the same process for ring terminals to attached the wires to the motor controllers (we ONLY use ring terminals not spade or hook as we feel those could come off if the screws of the controller loosen. We had a screw do that last year but had no loss of power as the ring stayed put and delivered consistent connection even though the screw became loose.)
