Many times, we speak to customers looking for hand tooling to crimp contacts that ship on a reel, such as 350557-4. Whether for repairs, prototyping, or limited low-level production, many of these jobs aren’t worth the cost of high-dollar automated assembly tooling, yet that tends to be what manufacturers recommend for this type of contact. Are hand tools even an option?
The answer is “sometimes, if you’re fortunate.”
In many cases, connector manufacturers will not make a recommendation for hand tooling to work with reeled contacts. Hand crimping is not recommended for large volume production, or even medium volume, as it can very easily result in repetitive stress injuries for the operators working on the issue. Manufacturers like TE, Molex, and others don’t offer hand tooling for reeled contacts for this and other reasons.
However, some connector series also offer versions of their contacts shipped in bulk. 350638-4, for example, is the same contact as 350557-4 shown above, save in bulk form. Bulk contacts are expected to be sold and used for low-volume applications such as repair or prototyping, and they do have recommended hand tools such as 90575-1 in this case.
If you’re making a low-volume repair or prototype, you should try and find the Bulk contacts equivalent to the reeled contacts you’re hoping to use and try using those and their associated tooling, instead. Doing this takes a couple of steps in our search system, but it’s easy once you know how. First, we select a few specs in the Product Attributes section of the reeled contact: Series, Part Status, Pin or Socket, Wire Gauge, and Contact Finish. This will give us a small list of very similar contacts we can check for Bulk equivalents. Once you’ve selected these, click the ‘View SImilar’ button.
After clicking ‘View Similar’, we’re brought to a list of options that look like this. Fortunately for us, there’s a Bulk equivalent to our contact. Excellent!
Clicking on the link for the Bulk contact will bring us to its Product Detail Page, or PDP. At the bottom of the PDP, you’ll see a section called Tooling, and in the Tooling section for Bulk contacts you’ll find a couple of options for hand crimp tools, like this:
Now you have everything you need to know in order to find and acquire both contacts and tooling for your low-volume work. Please note, however, that this process is not foolproof. Not all suppliers offer bulk contacts for their connectors, and in some cases the search isn’t as clean as it was for this Commercial MATE-N-LOK device. If you’re having trouble, you can always contact DigiKey Applications Engineering for assistance.