Our New Universal Crimping Dies

It’s a big deal when we change what we’re doing across the board with crimping dies for our manual and pneumatic cable crimpers. After all, we've been selling the same dies for years, so what’s up?

There are a lot more cable types now than there used to be. And the cable manufacturers are squeezing the specs right down to the minimum in a lot of cases because copper can be a volatile commodity—its price can fluctuate wildly. So cable wire diameter is not as consistent as it used to be and that makes cable crimping more of a challenge.

The barrel diameter of a terminal has to be large enough to accept cable at the maximum diameter for a particular gauge size, but as that cable size varies among types and manufacturers, the same crimping force doesn't produce the same clamping force, and the risk is the cable can pull out of the terminal.

To help make sure that you can get quality crimps on all terminals and cable types, our engineering team developed a new series of crimping dies that have enough setting possibilities to handle virtually any crimping challenge you’re likely to come across.

Our universal die set consists of two A dies and two B dies, so you can match A and A, A and B or B and B to get 78 possible crimp settings. That allows us to create specs for cast copper, MagnaLug, MAX lug and even contacts for SB housings using the same set of dies.

An obvious benefit is you don’t need a dedicated MAX lug crimper any more.

Along with the new universal dies comes a new quick-change system for manual crimpers and pneumatic crimpers to make it much easier to change die sets—you don’t need special tools, and it just takes seconds.

Best of all, the universal dies and quick change pins for manual crimpers are an easy retrofit to existing crimpers.