Soldering and/or Crimping Cable Lugs

Agreed! But if you don’t have the tools then the crimped connection with a pair of sidecutters or pliers (or a vice-grip) leaves you with a dubious job.
This is my collection of crimping tools and I often find it incomplete…

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Or a bench vice. I’ve seen people crimp with a bench vice.

I’ve also grown many crimping tools over the years. Other than the 12-ton cable crimper (which crimps 10mm^2 up to 70mm^2), I have the same crimper you have second from the top-left for the smaller stuff, then I also have the crimper for the PV-cabling (which also works for these smaller spade-terminals used in appliances), the crimper for ethernet cable (of course), and one of my most enjoyable tools, the bootlace crimper!

If I’m out in the Gopse/Bundus with only a soldering iron, that’s better than nothing. I will solder. I’ve soldered a lug to an alternator cable once and it lasted longer than the alternator itself. It’s not that soldering is no good. It’s that it doesn’t last as long.

I’m still need in a crimper for the Anderson Powerpole plugs/sockets.
Those require a meneer of a crimper…

I used this one to crimp up to 70mm lugs:

With that tool, crimping was the easy part. Getting all the strands neatly into the lug was more tricky. I found that if you bind all the strands together by wrapping them in plastic you can get them into the lug. (A tiny rectangle cut from a piece of blister packaging works well.) Once in the lug you can carefully wiggle out the plastic - just make sure no part tears off inside the lug otherwise you will have a poor connection.

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The Nitto brand of electrical insulation tape works wonders. Use it upside down with the glue on the outside. It is just elastic enough to bind the strands nicely together, just leave a few mm, like 2mm bare wire exposed to get them in.

The glue will contaminate the copper wires and mess up the cold weld during crimping. This is a nono….

Groetnis

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Have you tried shrink sleeving instead of insulation tape??

At first yes, but tape is much quicker and also easy to remove. Shrinking must be cut off, so no go.

Groetnis

Something I’ve done in the past, is to mark the full amount of insulation to strip, but as a first step to strip only a few millimeter. This is much less likely to fray and you get it into the lug more easily. Then use a pocket- or carpet knife to cut it in the marked spot and slice it off, and simply slide it home.

Way more work though, compared to the mentioned methods of using tape or some plastic.

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I have similar hydraulic crimper at work, I will definitely use it for the large size wires.
It is interesting you mentioned that about the second crimp on the same lug.

The lugs are generally longer (about twice the size of the crimper dies), so I thought that doing two crimps on the same lug will do the job better, or stick to one crimp in the middle of the lug…?

How about this - The stock wires of JBD SP25S003-16S, 100A are 2x10AWG (2x6mm2) and the closest size lug is 16mm2 which is a little larger than the 12mm2 (2x6mm2) BMS pigtail. Is it a good idea to add some wire strands from another cable in order to fill up the lug, despite being of different type.
For example have 2x6mm2 from the BMS (silicon cable with large amount of very thin strands) and add some 4mm2 from general-type copper cable with thicker copper strands?

Do they ship this with AWG wires?

Yes, the stock BMS pigtails are 2x6mm2 silicon copper cables (both ends: B- and C-).

I thought the world was done with US standards. (and that the last US threads were screws used on the desktop PC :frowning: )

I think here one must just use common sense. For my crimper, the die is wide enough that if I crimped twice, I’m going to go “over” the part that was already crimped. You want to avoid that. If the lug is long enough that you can fit two non-interfering crimps next to each other, then sure, crimp it twice. With the non-hydraulic crimpers that’s often the only way to do it anyway.

As always, there are always some exceptions to the general rule :slight_smile:

Hi, shsssssss, kom terug huis toe… SA mis jou klaar…