HA! All these years I have thought "I just suck at crimping. I'm sure the experienced guys are so much faster." I feel much better now. Thanks!

0:28 “The Corona thing that happend in China”, how little did we know back then. On the positive side, we got hours of great Clive live streams 😁

Can't believe I found a 30min video on crimping tools so educational and enjoyable. Many thanks for sharing 👍

I bought the simple iwiss tool about 6 months ago and it's made my life so much easier. I do a lot of crimps for drones and it handles everything from tiny 1mm pitch JST-SH up to molex micro-fit 3.0 with no drama at all. Love it

Its nice to see you struggle with making those connections. I was starting to think I was doing something wrong but it turns out my inability to crimp those consistently is normal :) Thanks!

A Hellerman Deutsch rep once showed me a crimping tool for use with the connectors on 132kV power lines. And a short length of wire (as thick as my wrist) with a connector crimped on. The crimp had been hacksawed at an angle to expose the stranded cable: the strands had fused together and the connector had fused to the cable. Compression welding. Done properly, crimps are *very* reliable.

“Tomorrow world “ how can I forget, it was my favourite on Wednesday during the 80’s as far as remember. Good old days .

I took your advice and purchased the IWISS brand ,saving me £18 and a lot of frustration with the other brands. Thank you for the quality video and very informative information.

So glad it's not just me, who has issues with crimping hand tools. Thanks Clive for being human. 🙂

I have an IWISS brand version of the one you said was garbage. If you'd asked me on the first day owning it, I'd have enthusiastically agreed with you, but after a few hours of learning the tool, I can now create great crimps on dupont connectors with a single squeeze very quickly. It's all about learning your tool and getting the hang of it.

A tip for crimping the female "DuPont" style connectors: Get a piece of straight male pin header, snap off a section 4 pins long. Push all 4 pins through so that one side has exactly 5mm sticking out. Superglue on the other side to keep them from sliding. When you want to crimp a female connector, slide it onto one of the middle pins of this guide (on the 5mm side) first. Then the side pins should touch the jaws, keeping the pin in position. When you strip the wire, strip 3mm off the end (Knipex 12 40 200 strippers have a length guide and work well, but are $90 so not likely paired with a cheap guideless crimper...). When you insert the wire into the connector for crimping, the ends will run into the pin guide, so you won't over-insert the wire. And the guide will position the connector correctly in the tool. Credit for this idea goes to www.instructables.com/Make-a-Good-Dupont-Pin-Crimp-EVERY-TIME/

Clive, I really appreciate you explaining the JST-XH type crimps. They're the ones I like best and get for cheap at my favorite electronics supplier. I was going crazy trying to find a compatible tool, didn't even know its proper name. Thank you so much!!

I believe in using the proper tools for the job and in automotive there are tons of different size terminals we use. I have purchased a number of the Iwiss open barrel tools with mixed results. I enjoyed this video a lot. It is honestly amazing how many different styles there are and how many tools you need for this type of work. Great video sir.

I used to work at a John Deere dealership. The folks who designed the equipment just loved their crimp on terminals and large variety of connector bodies. They lived in a rarefied world in which equipment didn't vibrate, terminals lose tight contact with one another due to metal fatigue and/or wear, get left in the rain (also washed at the end of the day, then get parked in a shed to stay wet as long as possible), covered in mud or even worse -- dust, and subjected to a near infinite variety of operator randomness. The designers weren't fans of having much slack in the cable runs for mechanics to work with either. :-( The above mostly aside, I like the crimp on terminals because the crimps are air tight; it's rare to see corrosion where the terminal is squished around the conductor. My solution to the wide variety of terminals I'd see was to buy a ratcheting crimping tool with a variety of changeable crimping dies. It always worked without much fuss or bother. It wasn't inexpensive, but it saved a lot of frustration while working with the specialized (designed to lock into a connector body) terminals.

Thanks Clive. If it can go wrong it will. Especially with the camera rolling.😁

I'm so happy I got the iwiss SN2820 months ago at random for some dupont style crimps and you've gone through 8 other styles and still highly recommend them.

The SN 28b is actually for uninsulated spade terminals and simular stuff and they do thouse pretty well. Especially the one with the jaw style of the blue one.

Really loved Tomorrow's World and watched it religiously every week! I have not yet got into these connectors yet as such. at the moment I generally buy ready made cables and connectors but as I need more and more I will be equipping myself appropriately. Very informative as always. Having watched your triumphs and failures, I can see myself seriously losing it for quite a while until I finally master them :)

Have tried many crimp tools over the years but have always ended up going back to the Kompress Crimpstar TIPO-HP2 (0.25 to 1.6mm) which has been the most reliable crimp tool in my collection for 20+ years. It was a gift many years ago from an electrical engineer friend who was fed up seeing me pfaffing with a crap crimp tool.

Ahh, crimping😊.... One of my old jobs in military aviation was PTT - Precision Termination Tools. Quite exacting standards, every techie & every tool/die was tested annually with 3 wires (6 crimps) samples sent away to a testing lab at MOD St Athan. Test results back were pass/fail- voltage drop & tensile strength of crimp. Gave confidence in tooling, techniques & to remove a defective tool from use. Kinda felt sorry for the poor person who had to sit there testing thousands of these samples each year!

"You have to...when you get your tool...and before each use...you have to really get a feel for this" I picked up the Iwiss SN28B and have been very happy with it...thank you Clive :)

Clive, you are OUR preferred tool!

My projects involve terminal crimping maybe a few times a year, usually with a different terminal type than the last project. I feel like I figure all this stuff out every time - which die to use (I have an Astro 9477), which way the terminal is oriented in the die, whether the terminal barrel seam goes up or down... It is maddening! I would *love* to see you make more videos where you figure this stuff out and share your experiences. I really appreciated that you tested the strength of your test connections, because many of us hobbyists have small kits with limited pieces and don't want to waste them experimenting.

Seriously, I don't regret buying an IWISS Crimp Tool, just the manual pressure, ability to get into tight spaces with the small tool and that you can see more while crimping has made it my go-to crimp tool.

Back when i was a student in electronic engineering (fun times), we crimped a bit with a pair of pliers just to hold them and applied a bit of solder into it to seal the deal. It worked, simple, effective, good connection, and of course not very much standard, but hey, we were students, and i don't recall anyone ever telling us at that time that we were doing it wrong. The only downside, too much solder and the connector wouldn't fit in.

One thing I like to do when preparing the terminals for crimping is to cut the strip of terminals leaving little tabs at the back of the pin. So you can insert the wire into the pin visually (no jaws are in the way), and hold on to both by pinching the tab of metal at the back and the wire. Then you can put the wire/pin combo into the jaws and crimp it in one go.

Thank you.I ad a heck of a time trying to find the right crimpers. I use JST plugs all the time and had bought a couple setd of crimps that said they were for the type and size of pins I had. Long story short, they weren't. Since then, I've been scared to buy another set for fear they were incorrectly labeled as well. Just ordered a one of the Iwiss ones just now. Thank you, this video was a huge help.

This was interesting enough when I first saw it that I remembered it 2 years later when I found myself in need of small crimpers. After checking eBay and Amazon and finding their best deals a lot more than when you bought yours googled IWS-2020M and found a listing on Aliexpress that led me to search there, sign up and order an IWS-2020M and an FSA -0626 for less than $1 more than the listing you showed (not bad with the rampant inflation lately). They came yesterday in just under 2 weeks so I'll probably use Ali again. I haven't used them yet but they look very nice (no ding in the cutting part). Thanks again for making videos like this.

I think this was a fantastic depiction of the difficulty of making good crimps when you can't afford the exact matching tool and dies for the specific terminal that you're trying to crimp. Like you said, those things can easily cost many hundreds of pounds or dollars or Aussie dollaridoos, and that's just for a hand crimper... once you get into production line tools, they can cost thousands!

I saw the Engineer PA 09 on the thumbnail to this video and I wondered what you would have to say about it as I bought one after getting a refund on the truly awful one Screwfix sell. Very glad to note your comments match my experience! Yes it does a good job but it isn't exactly my favourite tool, that honour goes to my Irwin Vise Grip self adjusting 8" wire stripper. Massive time saver.

I used molex or Amp most of the time at work. We had to use a micrometer every morning to make sure the tool was crimping within specifications. They had a crimping tool for every pin you could imagine. I would have loved to have their collection. So many of the pins started coming in on reels. Then they had Amp machines with a different head for each pin. I sure miss working there. I could make any cable including ribbon cable with connector and strain reliefs. Keep up the great work. I love your videos.

Awesome, Love your style. I've always said, the best way to test anything(software) is in production, ie, live. With your demonstrations of the various tools, I realized I was actually right on with the "minor" issues I was having. I purchased this budget pair and they work similarly to one of your preferred ones. FUTC from Aliexpress ~ 6-7 US $ ("Professional" Multi-tool pliers Crimping Pliers wire stripper) Keep up the great work!

I always twisted the conductors...not any more. I learned something today.

The cutter you mentioned at 20.11 is not a defect or damaged by someone trying to cut something hard. The small notch is there to prevent the cable from slipping out when the cutter jaws closing in to cut the cable, hence it's important to position the cable intended to cut beyond the notch closer to the hinge of the cutter.

I have a AMP 90005 crimper. Had it for 30 years, still going strong

I found this very informative, thanks for making it. Tools, techniques and processes are always interesting to me.

Clive, you forgot one of the most important things with the ratchet crimpers, they have the tension adjustment. If they crimp to hard you can lower the tension a little so it wont damage the wire or crimp. I personally hate crimping connectors especially the JST style ones, so fiddly and crimps come out pretty shit most of the time. Cant count the amount of wasted crimps.

When I crimp a cable that needs a given length, per individual wire, I provide me with 1 cm extra length and 0.1 mg of Valium.

In aviation, we use many types of crimp terminals for various wiring terminations. These are typically ratcheting crimpers, many of which require periodic calibration. This was a fun video to see!

I have a ratcheting crimper set with two sets of jaws (one set of jaws, still unused, works for the size range you're using here), and I've used it many times for car stereo and alarm/remote starter installations (6 & 8 gauge wire, using butt terminals and quick-disconnect terminals primarily). At first, I balked at the expense - $45 at the time - but then I remembered the really cheap $20 stripper-crimper-and-screw-cutter tools I had been using for years, and how every one had become bent with only crimping use (quite a few Chinesium ones, and even a 1980s Crapsman), and how much hand strength it took to squeeze those suckers... And I decided, "why not?" Turned out to be one of the best tools I have ever owned. Even though I don't use it very often, when I do use it, I love how it makes consistent, good-quality crimps (on both stranded AND solid-core copper) with far less effort. My only gripe is that most of the time, I don't open my hand far enough to reset the mechanism. 18:25 - The crimpers I have are similar to those. The serrated wheel at the pivot point with +/- on it sets your maximum limit. Because I'm disorganized, I often have to resort to Vise Grips sometimes to crimp those types of terminals, and if I do it properly, it does a fairly good crimp. Most tools like these are shipped with a very light spritz of oil to prevent rust during distribution.

I recently got a crimper from "Preciva" so far I like it, they had a learning curve to them but once I got the mI was able to crimp all my connectors. I have problems with the JST connectors not wanting to let the metal parts slide in and click though, I have to take something and push them in sometimes.

I have bought IWISS branded ratcheting crimpers for the small molex type connections and also one for the wire crimps that hold the wires nicely for inserting into screw terminals. They work quite well and are reasonably priced.

Here from the “grape bunch lights” video. Hoping this is the one where everything goes wrong... love this channel. Bigclive binge watcher here...

glad to see someone else not get on with JST and dupont connections Molex crimps so easy to use

I found this interesting if only to discover that you can release a crimp with the little lever!!! I never knew that and I had actually fitted one in my crimper at the wrong angle ( to try it out) and it was my last good one! There it was 'stuck in the groove' waiting to be destroyed whilst I'm watching your video and you 'just happened to say' how you could release it! I like your style Clive..

0:32 "Oh that was the Covid thing that "was" happening in China..." - Interesting

Thank you for this video! I have spent days trying to figure out how to use these crimps (had two different ones) for both KK and Molex (and some other I can't remember), even from multiple "manufacturers") with mostly awful results. The occasional time the crimping was Ok, it was still more or less non-repeatable. Also experimented with different wire types, sizes etc. Now I know that it wasn't simply me sucking - It was that the tools suck more!

I still have my Paladin crimper that i used back in the 1980s to make Token Ring connections, you really do have to get a feel for them

I have a crimping tool with the 28B jaw. I spent a lot of time trying to make it work with Dupont connectors. Finally I adjusted the screw that controls the pressure on the tool and then it worked very well. The adjustment has to be very precise. If the screw is out of the correct position, it will not work properly.

Seeing read the description in the title freightented me after what happened to Cody's lab a few years

The technique I use is to keep a little part of the metal strip on the connector - instead of cutting the connector off the strip, cut the strip leaving a 6mm tab on the end of the connector, that way you can hold the connector by the strip while crimping, once crimped the tab easily breaks off by bending back and forth.

This will very useful for me in the future. Now I just need to figure out what crimping is.

Hi Clive, I have and still use a genuine Molex tool with the latch and stop for the connector. Still produces perfect results but, as you say very expensive, cost about £130 and that was over 30 years ago.

I had the IWISS on order and in the mail, when you posted this video, Clive. Looking forward to having a crimper with a fully linear action. You're lucky, I didn't get those instructions with mine. Pro'sKit a Taiwan brand makes high quality crimpers and a huge range of tools. I have one of theirs with a set of changeable dies.

On the high end ratchet crimp tools, you normally buy a kit with a few dies that can be swapped out. They also have an adjustment sprocket to set the pressure that the catch releases the ratchet. I have two nice ratchets that I use. One has dies for RJ and BNC the other is for the DP/JST style of termination.

the parallel jaw iwiss 3220m is easily my favorite crimper. it works on all the stupid small crimps you find in modern tvs and laptops at the expense of being tedious on dupont and unusable on older molex style power connectors. i've bought several of those iwiss 3220m's for work and home and a travel bag and every one at every price point has been at least serviceable if not perfect. every classic die crimper i've ever bought on ebay (apart from some used molex dedicated $$$ tools) needed finishing before it worked properly, often they would work fine if not for the paint the chinese love to use on the dies instead of chemically blueing them. a light filing to correct the geometry tends to turn a $5 crimper into a useful tool it's almost like buying chinese lockpicks or chinese tweezers, they ship a tool that is finished just enough to be technically usable and if you need more precision or surface finish it's up to you to put in the effort

Somewhere in my workshop I have an AMP crimper that auto feeds the crimps so when making harnesses you just slot the wire in the hole, squeeze trigger then it automatically advances the strip, loads of different heads for it. Admittedly it cost about 10 times as much as the ones featured.

Crimping is my nemesis. Thank you for the guidance here. Just seeing the IWISS product instructions 14:00 is super helpful. I can understand what went wrong with my crimps rotating and getting mangled up.

I have made quite a few terminations with the iWiss tool for DuPont connectors. The comments section above regarding DuPont terminations are congruent with my experience. It took a few practice runs before I was able to master the art of proper crimping. The object lesson is that it is usually worth paying extra to get a top quality crimp tool. A Tyco/Amp tool for RJ45s is $100+ US, but is is rare to make a bad crimp and the tool is more productive than a $30 US crimp tool. The expensive Tyco tool paid for itself probably the first week I used it.

Went through the whole thing 30 years ago. No internet, things happened kinda slow and jerky. Same Molex connectors. Were the inputs, outputs and control points for a bidirectional intercom amplifier. Ended up mailing several of the teensy little parts to our main electronic supplier out of Chicago and they sent me the tool. $75 US in about 1988. Tool handle was TRW Cinch with a set of Molex jaws to fit two different sizes of female connectors. They were nice enough to send a bag of each size, 20 bits per bag. The whole episode took about 100 days to accomplish, Thank goodness I was being anal and did all of this well before I needed to do all of the coming changes. Just to illustrate some differences between 1988 and 2020. Customer service was king. Now, not so much. This was in a 800+ bed detention facility in the Denver, Co. USA area. Michael in Colorado (retired)

11:00 That happened to me so often at my old workplace, it wasn't my tool, and it annoyed the hell out of me, I had to plied it off EVERY time and I had to do hundreds of connections, but it was such a time crunch I never thought about getting a new tool. Seeing you demonstrate that brought myself to that dark time. rofl

Spent some time and money on crimping tools and found only a few any use. Very helpful thanks Clive like them blue ones to join my collection.

I've been using the Iwiss strippers for years and really like them. My favorites by far. I don't do much crimping of multi-pin connectors (Molex etc.) so don't have much experience with them. I do have a set of crimpers that I bought for some project but can't remember who made them. Like Clive said, you can pay big bucks for crimpers and good luck with getting the quality crimp you are hoping for.

Brilliant Clive Brought back many Great memory's

The force needed for these small crimps does require a ratchet tool. In fact a non ratchet crimper gives you a much better "feel". I have used a Molex MT.1919 tool with just A and B positions for 30 years. They probably went out of production before the Internet since I can't find any reference. I work in 2 locations, so I'll be taking Clive's recommendation and order an IWS-2820 as a second crimper. I've found the Molex and JYK crimps and housings are not entirely interchangeable due to a slight difference in the barb position, so keep them separate. Another finding is that the JYK housings, already slightly off-white to begin with, yellow over time whilst the Molex don't, but this does not affect functionality. Thank you for the review Clive, very informative and useful.

Man, where was this video when i needed it??!! Still very informative. Thanks

I'm using the last iWiss one since a year or a bit longer and so far it did a very good job. JST (GH, PH, XH etc) , Dupont - no problems at all. I think i noticed it the first time in a video from Andreas Spiess who compared it to the Engineer. For Dupont i've also sometimes seen recommendations for the HT-213, but never tried it myself. The results in videos looked very good, but it's less versatile with other connectors.

Oh wow... that's what that tool is used for. I would never have guessed. Had one of those things in my toolbox for decades without knowing what it was for lol.

Thanks for another great video!

5:43 - Looks like they didn't allow for the thickness of the *crimp itself* when they designed these, especially the one with the blue handle.

I bought a set of cheapy Chinese crimpers for a job, they worked well. Then I needed to work with some other connecters so I bought another cheapy Chinese crimpers, but this time they had 4 different interchangeable heads. They are lovely. They live in their own pouch and are ready for action, if I can find them.

I use the PA-09 for my RC stuff. High quality but not the easiest to use. Like you mentioned the terminals sometimes get stuck in the tool, and for me when I crimp it sometimes bends them in a way that they won't go into the housing. It's a very manual process to use them. I've also used them for JST-XH terminals for RC LiPo balance leads, they work better for those than the Dupont style servo/Arduino connectors. Thanks for the video, I think I know which crimper I should get instead.

I recently got a set of JST XH connectors and an SN-01BM crimper and I think they are great.

Beautiful illustration Clive. 👍

I work in an electrical panel shop and deal with this on a daily basis. The best crimper for a Molex pin is the Molex tool. The Molex tool has a holder for the pin. You put the pin in and partially close the crimper. There is a stop for the wire and you catch the insulation on the insulation tab. Be aware that some pins have three tabs and the third one is to support the wire. The third tab does not get crimped. It is there only to support the wire. If you do a lot of stripping for these pins, you want a Weidmuller Stripax Mini Duro. Someone in the UK has them on sale for 25 GBP on ebay(a steal).

I have (3) sets of iWiss connector crimpers for JST to Anderson Powerpole, and a set of their hex ferrule crimpers. I tried another brand that didn't last the evening (the weak metal streched), got a replacement that made a mess of the connectors, then replaced them with an iWiss model that has worked perfectly. I could certainly spend a lot more but these have worked well for me (DIY hobbyist).

Thank you so much for the great video! I have had so many problems with these types of connectors. :)

today i got the pad-11 from engineer, it is fire. terminals don't get stuck at all, very good die quality, perfect curling action.

This is a good video. I have crimped dupont-style connectors a couple dozen times. I recently started building a DIY RC car with my daughter. I hadn't used a crimper in years. I have a PA-09 engineer crimper, but I was absolutely crushing and distorting my crimps after the first couple tries. I think I'm just out of practice. I did get it to work OK after a couple tries. I had to crimp some connectors onto a 6-wire cable for another project. I bought some 6-slot micro-fit molex connectors for this. I tried to use an SN-28B crimper from a cheaper brand (not iwiss) for these, and I was absolutely mangling the pins after my first couple tries. I think I was just using the wrong tool. I didn't really realize how much variation there is in the sizing of the ratcheting-style crimper dies and how critical it is to not mangle anything past the wings that are supposed to hold the conductor wire itself. I determined that I absolutely hate Micro-fit 3.0 Molex, and I'm going to use dupont-style connectors instead for this particular application. Iwiss makes an SN-28B. These are supposedly for dupont style connectors. I think this is why you weren't having good luck using them on those JYK connectors. The SN-28B jaws are probably too wide for those. In any case, My cheap set of SN-28Bs didn't come with instructions like those IWiss crimpers. I'm going to indeed measure the width between the 2 sets of wings on my connectors with digital calipers and also by eyeballing them in different positions in my various crimpers. It makes sense to me that you want a size that matches the width between the wings when parallel. I think I knew this when I last used these kinds of crimpers for electronic connectors a few years ago, but I forgot this detail. Thanks for pointing this out. I think this will prevent me from mangling connectors as my daughter and I try to finish building our DIY RC car next week.

Your mentioning "Tomorrows World " brought back some fond memories , including C.D's . Big fanfare about how indestructible they were , years later and we all now know that a single scratch can render them bin worthy . I used to be glued to every episode , i think Raymond Baxter was my favorite presenter because he had a great sense of humor when things went wrong

This video is way better because you screwed up multiple of those crimps. It really shows which tools are easier to use.

on the subject, i have a few chinese class d amp modules, and they usually have connectors that require a crimped plug/socket, and can never seem to get the right one to fit.so wonder if i should be looking for a particular type.

23:25 the offset insulation crimps on the “DuPont” terminals are actually not supposed to be crimped into the wire (creating the pretzel- or B-like cross section formed by the Golden Arches), but rather are for a *circular* die that wraps them _around_ the insulation, with the offset tips forming a continuous collar around the insulation, but without cutting into it. I know the Molex tooling actually creates that circular crimp, but I’ve never seen anything I could afford that does this.

Trying out a crimp set by Wirefy recommended by another KZfaq channel, and realizing it's been quite some time since I crimped anything but an RJ-45. The Wirefy unit looks like it was OEM'd by iWiss, but does seem to work. First time I've ever had a supply of "Du Pont"-style wires.

There are some crimpers that look almost identical to the first 2 crappy crimpers in the video, but they work perfectly on dupont terminals. Those good crimpers come with EDM machined precision dies which bend perfectly the connector and do not crash it.

You're supposed to use the round die for the triangular insulation tangs like on the Dupont. The W die will do exactly what you are experiencing. JAE MX-1900 terminals are the same way. The Engineer PA-24 actually has two round dies in addition to the appropriate size W dies.

Is there a difference between those kk connectors and the ones that are sold as kf2510? I bought a bunch of them and I can't tell if they are different.

You need a set of the Greenlee/Paladin CrimpAlls. Very rugged, and you can get all sorts of dies. I have two sets of the handles and a variety of different dies. About $70 for the base tool and maybe $20-$30/pair for additional dies. Previously, I had bought a set of the PowerWerx crimpers for Anderson PowerPoles for about $40 and 4-5 extra die sets, but the crimpers weren't rigid enough for good quality nylon-insulated connectors.

Why do you not leave the "wing/connector tab" on the connector? It makes it so much easier to position them into the crimper as you do not have to think about it. Plus you never have the issue with the connector being pushed out when inserting the wire. I then just cut it off with snips after crimping.

Thanks Clive, very useful video. I hate Molex crimping, never had luck with cheaper tools (I am not doing Molex on regular basis, so I never splashed for proper tool), so I will try recommended ones. Insulated terminals (car connectors they are called) are more in my ballpark, did hundreds of those for my engineering degree.

Great video, found myself needing to re-crimp a video-door system power line, which was wired by a moron and duck taped together. I purchased a SN-01BM before seeing this video and pleased it worked perfectly, best 3quid I've spend in a while. And another tool for my collection. Domestically the connectors are known as XH2.54 at least here in China.

Big Clive I love your videos sir. Just sending a quick hello from the US!

Thank goodness I ran across this video! At last I understand the issues with JST. Mistakes and all, it was very vert informative! Regards, R Rife usa

A good presentation of various low priced crimps. Logically if you are in the business of crimping lugs and pins frequently then you buy the top of the line tools. But for intermittent use the less expensive will suffice. I own both a five hundred dollar crimping tool and a twenty dollar tool and you can tell the difference when using them. One does prefect crimps every time with no fumbling and the other does take more time with the need to double check your work.

I play with the dupont connectors so I like to use sn-28b. It is a bit tricky to use at first.

Really Clive "get your tool out and find a stripper " then you go and screw it up. Enough said. Keep it up Clive

I use the Rennsteig/Knipex crimpers. For MiniFit Jr. and similar crimps it has an indexing clamp that ensures perfekt positioning etc

Is there a wire stripping tool (preferably auto) that you would recommend?

Any suggestions for making stuff not get stuck after crimp? I have a tool for Anderson PowerPole and it seems to do a nice job, stuff is solid......but I always have the crimps stuck in the tool and sometimes break the tabs getting the crimped part out.

Thanks, very enlightening - you dint mention the adjustment wheel that some of the ratchet tools have... I bought a cheap ratchet crimp tool (Weirli SN-28B), mainly for Dupont and JST XH 2.5 pins - dint have much success with it, mangled most or dint crimp hard enough and the wire pulled out easily. So I threw it (metaphorically) into a dark corner and now I solder the wires in and fold the strain relief tabs with pliers. 25% success rate with the crimp tool, 99% with the solder method.