Wire Ferrules - BEST Amp Connection - WHEN TO CRIMP!?

in custom car audio we use stranded power wire and speaker wire due to its flexibility and durability but using this stranded wire can have some issues especially when it comes to connecting that stranded wire to our amplifiers or to our speaker terminals this is why we use these little things right here wire Ferrell's in this video I'm gonna go over the benefits of using wire Farrell's and show you guys a cool cost-effective tool I found that can be used in order to crimp the ferals directly onto the wires I'll show you guys which wires we would use the crimping tool for and which ones we wouldn't let's get started so in a little bit here we're going to get into when you would use the crimping tool and when you would not use the tool but for those of you that may have not seen these in some of the previous videos I first want to talk about what is a wire ferrule a wire ferrule is a thin copper tube that is tin plated now you can see they come in a wide variety of different sizes for the different wire sizes and then they also come in insulated and non insulated form now when we don't use a wire ferrule our install ends up looking a little something like this we of course have to try to twist the wires as much as possible and to try to cram them into that tight little spot can be difficult this can be an issue because if one single wire strand accidentally comes out of that terminal and goes into a spot that it's not supposed to be it can short-circuit another potential issue is once we tighten down that set screw it forces all the wires apart and it kind of cuts the wires and separates them if we ever do need to disconnect a wire it can be very difficult to reinstall it into the terminal and this oftentimes means that we have to cut and shorten the wire which can be troublesome for an install if we don't have enough wiring to deal with when we use a wire ferrule in this case a non insulated version I simply slide it over the wire strands and then I can temporarily hold it in place using heat shrink I then insert it into the amplifier terminal and crank down that set screw so when we use a wire ferrule like this you can easily see the advantages first of all I can add it into the amplifier multiple times without any concerns of wire strands fraying out and if I do need to service that amplifier I can easily disconnect it and add it back into that amplifier terminal multiple times without issues so some of the number one questions that always come up whenever I show wire Ferrell's in the video are first of all hey Mark I don't think it's good enough to use heat shrink to secure the wire ferrule to the wire and you would be correct the heat shrink is only to hold it on temporarily to hold it in place and it makes it have a little bit of a cleaner look what actually does hold the ferrule in place and what crimps it is once we added into the terminal and cranked down that set screw you guys have to remember that this is not super strong metal this is just tin plated copper it's very very thin so it easily forms to the shape of that terminal and this is when we get into when should we use the crimping tool that I'm going to show you guys and when shouldn't we so this is just my opinion and this is what has worked best for me but when you were using terminals like this you can see that these terminals are round unfortunately the different crimping tools on the market do not allow for a round crimp so the reason that I just like using the set screw in order to actually crimp that ferrule to the wire is because then this ferrule is going to stay the same round shape as the terminal and we're also adding the shape of the set screw itself into the ferrule so we have a really nice crimp that is going to fit exactly into this it's going to perfectly match that set screw and that set screw is really going to bite down in and hold on by using this method I've never had any issues with a power wire pulling out of a round terminal if I were to use a crimping tool for these that do go into the round terminal it's going to get all deformed anyway because the crimping tool is either going to crimp it down to a square or a hexagon once I put them in that round terminal it's gonna get all deformed and try to match that round terminal anyhow so we might as well just use the set screw in order to crimp that down so in what case do we use the crimp tool that gives us these style of crimped end connections well on integration devices like this the audio control LC to I we are more and more often seen plugs like this that allow us to easily disconnect the wiring and plug it into the device if we need to but you can see that inside of these terminals they are square we are also seeing these connections more and more often on amplifiers again for the same reasons it's really nice to be able to easily disconnect our wiring if need be and real quick while we're talking about amplifiers and integration devices now is a great time to thank our monthly channel sponsor audio control audio control recently released their new ACM which stands for our audio control micro a series of amplifiers as you can see the footprint on these amplifiers is incredibly small now what's super cool as many of you are probably familiar with audio controls legendary LC - I you use this to take the factory signal from the vehicle and convert it to line level RCA outputs but if we just do a quick size comparison these a cm amps actually have the same technology from an LC - I built in so for basically this much more footprint we're adding a 300 watt amplifier pretty awesome stuff you guys can learn more about these amplifiers I did a video recently you can check it out up in the corner of the screen so back to these style of connections when we're using these style of connections we no longer have a huge set screw that we can tighten down in order to secure a ferrule so in that case we're gonna rely upon a tool to do the crimping and furthermore like I mentioned earlier inside of there is square so it matches the profile that we are creating on the end of these now I was able to find this tool for a great value I'll drop a direct link down in the video description for you guys and here we can see here's the crimping tool itself if we look at it it has these nice ergonomic plastic handles it also tells us that it does a wire gage from 23 up to 7 gage and for those of you that are immediately thinking well I can't use it for 4 gage or zero gage remember that most of the time for 4 Gage and zero gage you're going to have amplifier terminals like this so you're just going to rely on that set screw to do the crimping now the other thing that I found really cool about this tool is it included all of these ferals along with this little storage case this is incredibly useful because now I can test out some of the sizes of Farrell's see what works best for some of the different wire sizes and it actually has up to a pretty big size right here so let's do a quick little sample install let's say we're installing the ACM - one point 300 and we know that right here we need our speaker level inputs so let's say we've connected these wires to the factory audio system out of the vehicle we've connected them to back left and back right and what we're going to be doing is we need to obviously have longer wires in an actual vehicle but we need to take that signal and feed it into this amplifier now I could just use these little stranded wires here and that's actually what I did before and you can see even pulling them out one time they're already kind of frayed and looking a little choppy we want a much more clean install let's use our Farrell's I start with stripping the wire so that a little bit more of the wire is actually exposed I strip it to about the same length as they exposed ferrule next I'm going to apply an insulated ferrule to one of the wires and then I will insert the exposed end of that ferrule into the tool and squeeze the handles of the scrimping it and that's it super easy process so there we have it we can see that using the crimping tool works really good for this style of connection now I'm curious if we take one of the largest ones here will it fit on a piece of eight gauge and can i crimp it down let's find out so for the most part it seemed to work the ferrule itself definitely fit over the wire the problem was the insulated part of the ferrule I had to cut some little slips in it in order for it to fit over the insulation on this wire but no big deal you could easily do that it's definitely crimped on there well and then I could just cover this with a piece of heat shrink tube overall I found this tool to be very useful for the price you just can't beat it and I did actually notice if you see this dial right here with that dial if you actually loosened that set screw right by my thumb there you can actually control the amount of pressure that is applied to the ferrule so I've had it set on the least amount pressure setting and I found that even at that setting it crimps the ferrule more than well enough to get it to permanently hold to the wire again the only thing I didn't like has more to do with the ferals that are provided in the kit themselves this largest size here it just didn't quite fit over the insulation for this 8 gauge wire but as we all know the insulation sizes can vary from wire to wire so it might actually fit over some of the other 8 gauge wire sizes so before you get started on your next car audio install definitely consider picking up a crimping tool so that you have it on hand ready to go again this is a very cost effective tool I'll put links to it along with the wire Farrell's down in the video description don't forget to check out monthly channel sponsor audio control and their new lineup of micro amplifiers and you can check out some of my other videos I've made in the past here on screen a special thanks to John Brian John Ally Nick Steve Jerry Emanuel and the rest of the patreon to those guys for being a part of the team helping make these videos possible if you want to learn more about that that's down below as well as always my friends thank you for watching

Channel: CarAudioFabrication

Views: 1,695,779

Keywords: car audio fabrication, car audio, caraudiofabrication, wire ferrules, wire sleeves, crimp ferrules, when to crimp, ferrules, ferrule, wire amplifier, car stereo, amplifier, amp terminal, amplifier terminal, wiring, installation, install, connection

Id: sMFFzpzKhFg

Length: 9min 39sec (579 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 06 2018