Shoutout to the guy who told me to ditch factory crimpers for a ratcheting set

I was rewiring a Garmin G1000 harness in a Cessna 172 hangar in Wichita last Tuesday when a pin backed out mid-test and killed half the displays. Turned out my $30 crimpers from the local shop were leaving cold joints on Molex pins. Has anyone else had a test fail because of bad crimp tooling?

3 comments

3 Comments

young.nora26d ago

Man, that's brutal. I read a whole deep dive on MooneySpace last month about how ratcheting crimpers stop pin drag on those tiny Molex pins. The guy was a retired avionics tech, said even the simple single indentation die matters. He swore the right tool turns a $10 connector into a solid instrument. Bad crimps like that are a silent killer in a panel.

clark.alex26d ago

@young.nora yeah that MooneySpace stuff is gold for this kind of work. I saw a post on some aviation forum where a guy tested like 20 different crimpers on those tiny pins and the ratcheting ones were the only ones that passed his continuity checks. He said the cheap non-ratcheting ones cause micro cracks you can't even see. Definitely makes you think twice before grabbing whatever crimper is in the drawer.

the_aaron25d ago

Man, I had a buddy who spent a weekend chasing a glitch in his homebuilt panel and finally found it was a bad crimp on a D-sub pin. He switched to ratcheting ones and said it was like night and day with his continuity tester.