To crimp or not to crimp, there is no question (1 Viewer)

[Njck22]

While soldering can indeed make for very nice connections, no doubts about that at all, the feeling in our house is pretty strong that there are very few soldered connections in vehicles, and this is due to vibration. A proper crimp goes a very long ways in preserving wires and their connections.


for those kind of ring terminals, we use the standard Snap-on crimper, PN 29CF.

I agree with your conclusion. All the times I have an issue with crimps is using the cheap vinyl insulated ones. No way to feel confident about that after crimping, so I'd hardly consider using those or the colored butt splices "crimping" to any reasonable standard.

Using the open barrel double crimp Toyota terminals or uninsulated ring terminals and a cheap amazon crimper I've had very satisfactory results. But in honesty the only way to feel 100% about that is to use the $$$$ tooling and dies that the wire harness manufactures have that is sized exactly to the wire size, insulation OD, and the specific terminal being used, to crimp with an exact repeatable amount of force on the wire.

I imagine those closed barrel types you mention earlier are great choice.

Short of those two options, solder 100%. I hate those multicolored cheapo terminals.