The BEST lug crimper on Amazon! TEMCO vs. Generic Yellow Crimper

I absolutely hate these crimpers about these things six or seven years ago when I first started getting back into car audio the instant I saw somebody on YouTube using one of these to crimp some big lugs I jumped right on Amazon and bought some I was trying to stretch my budget so I bought the cheapest ones I could find I don't usually go for the whole buy one's cry ones argument but this time that was a mistake because these are garbage and I'm not saying that all hydraulic crimpers are garbage but this particular set is just pure trash to use them you gotta swap out all these dyes but they're metric so you've got to do a conversion from metric to American wire gauge I went ahead and made those conversions and wrote them all on the case so we had to keep making those conversions over and over again and none of them turned out to be an exact fit for American wire gauge standard wire and that's just the tip of a big old Iceberg of trash for starters it leaks and hydraulic oil gets everywhere and on everything it is a huge mess in fact I'm using a paper towel to hold on to them so I don't get any more hydraulic oil on my fingers while I'm trying to operate my camera I even grabbed some simple green and gave it a thorough cleaning before I started filming and it's already covered in oil when the oil level gets low the crimper will only pump if you hold it upside down and that's a real pain because the dyes fall out when you turn it upside down foreign and of course when the oil runs out you get an absolute terrible crimp and at that point you've got to waste your valuable time unscrewing the handle to refill it you just got to put some hydraulic oil inside this Reservoir here and it's hidden behind the handle I'm sure it probably just needs some new O-rings but this from day one right out of the box the first time I opened it and that's just not acceptable that's not the worst part you don't have to hold it upside down for the dyes to fall out just give it a little wiggle and they'll hurl themselves to the ground I think you're supposed to have a set screw that goes right in here that holds the die in but this didn't come with a set screw I've wasted hours of my life fishing these things out from underneath workbenches but it gets even worse the lugs and the wire tend to fall out now they'll stay in after you've got a little bit of pressure but until that point you need to have an extra set of hands to hold the wire in the lug in while you start crimping foreign because this thing is almost impossible to use without four hands if you're anything like me you work alone and so you don't always have somebody around to hold the wire in place while you operate the crimper I often found myself holding the cripper against my leg while simultaneously holding the wire and operating the crimper bike contorting my hands into weird and uncomfortable shapes it's not too bad if I'm at a workbench but I still have to awkwardly operate the pump with one hand while trying to hold the wire with the other and this is a major pain in the ass when you're working inside of a car plus you get hydraulic oil all over your car this thing is so bad that every time I've ever used it in a video I throw in a disclaimer telling people not to buy one of these crimpers I've been able to tolerate all this and just make it work for probably about six or seven years now because honestly I just didn't use it that often but as the channel is growing and I'm working on more projects I find myself crimping lugs a whole lot more often so it is time for an upgrade this is a Timco brand hydraulic lug crimper I got this crimper off of Amazon and when I was browsing Amazon I went ahead and picked up this wire stripper right here more on this wire stripper in just a bit this thing is a major improvement over the other crimper for starters there are no dies well that's not a hundred percent true keep watching and I'll show you what I mean so instead of swapping out those traditional dies you adjust this knob up here at the top and that is a huge Advantage because you can just slip your lug in here and then tighten this down so the lug stays in place and that's gonna free up one of your hands plus you don't have to worry about matching up one of those dies to different sizes of wire and anyone who's messed around with car audio much at all has learned that not all wire is the same some brands are slightly oversized and some are undersized and none of that matters you just tighten down that knob and start crimping plus the handle is spring loaded you just push it down and it snaps right back and this may not seem like a big deal but it makes a huge difference now you can operate the crimper with just one hand foreign earlier that doesn't use dies and again that's not 100 true instead has these things right here and the owner's manual calls this an indent there are two of them one down here and one stored in the end of the adjustment knob well why are there two of them well one of them has a little plus sign and the other one's got a minus sign and you can swap these out depending on which one you're trying to crimp your positive or your negative that's kind of a cool touch when you're done with your crimp you'll either have a plus or a minus stamped into your lug oh yeah and they don't fall out because they're held in with magnets another big plus is that the head rotates that's going to make things a lot easier when you're trying to get your wire inside the crimper but none of that matters if you can't get a good solid crimp so let's see how it performs so now I'm going to make a few grips with various style of lug and different sizes of wire [Music] just for comparison here is the die style crimper foreign [Music] but it leaves these flanges which are just a little bit ugly for this crimp here I use the Timco and I place the indent on the split side of the split lug you can clearly see the indent made by the crimper but the lug is deformed so avoid doing that if you want a good crimp when the indent on the bottom you get a much better crimp with this type of lug notice what happens with this ring terminal here as I'm crimping you can see the ring deforming now on the other side of the indent you see these two flat spots and those are barely noticeable when using larger gauge wire for this crimp I didn't have the lug perfectly Square inside the crimper and that gave me an ugly crimp but that has no impact on the stream here I'm clamping on some vice grips and I'm trying to pull the lug off of The Wire foreign [Music] and all that did was pull the wire out of the jacket itself one thing I was curious about with the positive and negative indent be visible after you put some heat shrink on your lug this is four to one heat shrink and it just would not shrink down into the indent and Shrink tight around the plus sign I gave it a try with some 4 gauge wire as well again I could not get the stamp to show through the heat shrink so those little stamps on the indent it's kind of cool but ultimately kind of useless so it's not a perfect tool and it does have some other downsides there was no on or off label on the on off dial second it's only a five ton crimper so the question then becomes is five tons enough and the answer is well probably you just saw me try to pull some wire out of a lug and the held just fine the manual includes a handy chart explaining how many pumps you need to give it in order to crimp wires of various size in my experience I found that you need a a few more pumps it didn't come with a carrying case and that's probably okay because you don't have to keep up with all these stupid dies is it a better tool than this cheap die style crimper well absolutely but it also has a much higher price and there are a ton of these doc style crimpers on the market so maybe a more expensive dye style crimper won't have some of the drawbacks of this cheap one but the temco is the only one I could find that had the spring-loaded handle so I definitely think it's worth the extra money before I show you this wire stripper that I mentioned earlier I want to take a second to say thank you to all of my patrons and as always my 25 patrons get an extra shout out so thank you very much Bo Bam Bam Dylan David T Fargo JD America and Baba so this thing is kind of cool it is spring loaded and does a great job of cutting through the insulation on large gauge wire yes give it a quick turn and you're done but it also cuts through a whole lot of the Strand so my advice is not to waste your money on this stripper right here instead click right here to watch this video I'm Justin this is the DIY audio guy YouTube channel I'll see you on the next adventure

Channel: DIY Audio Guy

Views: 32,081

Keywords: DIY, Audio, DIY Audio, Car Audio, Home Audio, Speaker Builder, subwoofer, speakers, ampifiers, DIY speakers, diy amplifers, bass, lug crimper, how to crimp wire, 0 gauge, 0 gague, wire, crimper, large wire crimper, hydraulic wire crimper, hydrolic crimper, car audio power wire crimper, temco industrial, hydraulic crimp tool, how to crimp battery cables, harbor freight hydraulic crimper, car audio installation, amplifier power wire, crimping tool, amazon crimper, amazon

Id: _gcd6inEqpo

Length: 8min 53sec (533 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 02 2023