Crimping or Soldering Flex cable

[wayne305]

Evening all, hoping someone can clear something up for me.

I was told today that all stranded flex cables need to be pin crimped or soldered before connections are made, eg, for a towel rail or small wall heater etc. He said the regs were altered in April 2012?

This is the first I've heard of this and just want to know if anyone can confirm this is true?

Cheers

Wayne

 

[Darkwood]

Here's one for the hand crimping tool fans out there, was flicking through the compex toolbox guide today and there's a little paragraph that states only ratchet type crimp earring tools should be used as they give a solid and even crimp unlike hand type ones (or words to a similar effect)

Think about it ... a hand pressure crimp is a guessing game.. a ratchet crimp can only release once the correct crimp pressure has been made - no brainer TBH

Small ferrules and similar are OK for hand crimps as its just a matter of ensuring the crimper fully closed and the actual crimp is just ensuring the fine wires are neatly packed it crimping where you need to ensure a solid tight link that will need ratchet style or better like lugging jointing etc...

 

[CockneyReject]

I can see why Darkwood and whole heartily agree with it, all my crimping tools are ratchet other than one hydraulic pair and all of them are checked regularly and well looked after to the point that the other day when working with another spark and he asked me where I'd bought my new bootlace crimpers from (they are 6-7 year old now and well used)

 

[shanky887614]

Think about it ... a hand pressure crimp is a guessing game.. a ratchet crimp can only release once the correct crimp pressure has been made - no brainer TBH

Small ferrules and similar are OK for hand crimps as its just a matter of ensuring the crimper fully closed and the actual crimp is just ensuring the fine wires are neatly packed it crimping where you need to ensure a solid tight link that will need ratchet style or better like lugging jointing etc...

with ferrule crimpers though you are tightening them as much as you can.

thats why there are so many holes in them, hydralic crimpers are nice.

makes crimping 70mm+ easy

 

[Robotstar5]

I've had a set of DMC crimping tools for a few years and I'd highly recommend them. They get heavily used and abused and they still pass a calibration test. https://www.dmctools.com/Products/dct_series_crimp_tools.html

I use a DMC tool with interchangeable heads for crimping pins/sockets in multipole connectors, good kit.

Found Weidmuller make some of the best cord end ferrule crimpers, the only times they've let me down was when I've mismatched the cable/ferrule sizes