Help Me Find a Suitable Crimping Tool

[rvalente]

Hello Mates,

i'm looking finding the correct crimping tool at and affordable price. I need do crimp:

Tyco CPC - Circular Plastic Connectors
Amp Timer Power and Junior
Molex KK

I prefer something from iwiss or icrimp, as I can easily source from aliexpress.

Greetings, Renan

[tooki]

“Correct” and “affordable” are mutually exclusive if you want to buy new.


The more I’ve used cheap Chinese crimpers, the less respect I have for them. I instead recommend buying original (name-brand) tools used. You can get them for a fraction of the cost of buying new. You can even often find new original tools on auction and classified ad sites for massive discounts if you have patience. I’ve bought several brand-new Molex and TE crimpers for $60-120 each instead of $350-500 normal price.

Also FYI even for advice on cheap crimpers you’ll need to be far more specific about what exact contacts you want to crimp, and to what wire. Molex KK, for example, covers two completely different sizes of connector, and in the larger size, some contact models are “friendlier” to non-official tools than others… TE CPC is a blanket name covering a wide array of disparate connector families that use radically different contact types, in a wide array of sizes. It is categorically impossible to recommend a tool for CPC, because no such tool exists.

If you don’t want to buy the real tooling, then I suggest buying pre-crimped leads to assemble your cables with. Cheap crimpers are a deep, deep rabbit hole to fall into, with very little to show for it in the end. Also, because cheap crimpers never have locators (positioners to hold the contact in place), even if you manage to find a cheap crimper that is actually capable of properly crimping your contacts, using them is generally significantly slower and more error-prone than the original tools.

[nctnico]

For Molex KK get the Molex hand tool: 64016-0201  It is too affordable to mess around.

I second Tooki's suggestion to go for the original tools if possible. Especially for very small pitch contacts, the official tool is the only one that will work well. Having said that, I do have a few cheap ratchet (*) crimpers around that work reasonably well but only for prototyping purposes.

* Never ever consider a crimper without a ratchet mechanism!

[jonpaul]

For serious tools:

1/ Avoid Chinese junk

2/ Look for vintage US brands or EU like Molex, Philips, Besr, AMP

3/ Get exact tool and  dies for required crimp connectors.

Not cheap but last a lifetime

j

[tooki]

For Molex KK get the Molex hand tool: 64016-0201  It is too affordable to mess around.

Strong disagree there: that’s a garbage tool. We got one of those at work and it was so bad we returned it. Literally useless. Moles should be ashamed to even sell such a thing. I have a picture of it here: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/reviews/affordable-crimp-tools-for-small-connectors-(dupont-etc-)/msg5154528/#msg5154528

Plus, within the KK family, it’s only for KK254; OP hasn’t told us whether they are using KK254 or KK396.

The real tools for all the connectors that tool is for cost a lot more, and have proper locators.

[EPAIII]

I am a stickler about good crimps. I have seen more than my share of bad ones and the problems they cause.

Over the years I have found some tools that I have found to work on some of the available terminals. They range from a professional AMP tool that uses the expensive, interchangeable dies and a ratchet that insures they are completely closed down to some of the inexpensive tools, ALSO BY NAME BRAND MANUFACTERERS for the common insulated and non-insulated terminals.

I have also returned or in some situations just trash-canned some tools that did not perform properly.

I have read the literature by some of the OEMs stating that you MUST use a tool by the same manufacturer as the terminals you are using, but for the general insulated and non-insulated terminals, I have found this to not be the case. For the most part a properly made tool will work with multiple brands of terminals. How do I know, you ask. Here is my TEST.

I take a sacrificial terminal and the size of wire that I intend to use and crimp it with the tool that matches those sizes. With the inexpensive, non-ratchet tools, I MAKE SURE the jaws do completely close. ALL good tools have a pair of flats on the jaws that stop the closing action when the proper closure has been reached. Those flats take the place of the ratchet on more expensive tools and MUST touch before releasing the tool. After properly crimping I hold the terminal in a bench vise and pull the wire until it either breaks or pulls out of the terminal. If it breaks, but not too easily, then the tool and terminal are a good match for that wire size and I proceed using them. But if the wire pulls out of the terminal without leaving part of it behind in the terminal, then it was a BAD crimp and I do not use that combination. I have been using this test for over 50 years and it has never allowed me to make bad crimps.

This is also a good test of the ratcheting tools. They too can wear out of tolerance.