In the sailing & boating community I often find lots of skepticism surrounding crimped terminals. This of course is of little surprise to me, because the average crimp tool I see on boats I set foot on costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $4.50. I suppose I'd be a skeptic too especially if I'd spent less than the cost of a Whopper Jr. for my crimping tool. (grin)


After thinking about all the skepticism, I decided to do a little illustrative experiment to display the strength of a crimp executed with mid-grade crimp tool.


To do this I used the heat shrink crimp termination you just saw being made in the heat shrink terminal part of this article. The wire used here is 12 AWG UL 1426 tinned marine grade wire and the rather affordable FTZ crimp tool made the crimp.


This photo shows the crimped butt connector holding the entire weight of two 35 pound class anchors. The static load hanging on this butt splice is approx 70 lbs..