Choosing a good crimper

My favorite crimper

I’ve tried some of the really expensive crimpers that are prohibitively expensive and ONLY crimp. I guess if that was all I did all day, it might make a difference, but I keep my crimper around mostly for quick fixes and I really appreciate the swiss-army style crimpers that have cutters, strippers and even an RJ12 connector included.

Best features
I’ve tried a handful of them, and I have some favorite features. Many will have a crimper/cutter that is supposed to give you the perfect amount of exposed twisted pairs. I never use them. They take two blades that are supposed to bite only into the outer jacket but they invariably nick the individual wires, and the amount of the twisted pairs they expose is never enough. I strip off a little extra (usually about ¾”) and then trim the wires once they are all lined up so I get a clean edge against the end of the RJ45 head.

Some crimpers have a blade notch that will let you position the UTP cable and rotate the blade around the jacket. They still aren’t as useful as a stand-alone jacket stripper, except that I don’t always have a stand-alone stripper with me, and it is definitely the best backup option.

Some crimpers will ratchet so that they only open once it is fully crimped. I really dislike those models; the concept doesn’t make any sense to me. The only time I would release my grip when crimping an RJ45 head is when something is wrong or I need to readjust, then I don’t want the tool to ratchet down on me because then I have to fight it to open again. If nothing goes wrong, I just squeeze and I’m done, and the ratchet again doesn’t really give any benefit. I choose no ratchet.

When should you pay more?
The one advantage of the expensive ratchet crimpers is that the crimp come perfectly perpendicular to the RJ45 head, most of the cheaper crimpers work like pliers and kind of crimp from an angle in a pinch motion. I’ve had problems making patch cables when either the last rj45 connector didn’t set on the first pass or that the IDCs in the head slipped off the wire and didn’t get a good connection. My tool now crimps from the bottom up, so it is still perpendicular