Written by Andy Neat, Senior Product Manager- Marking & Identification and Toolfox

Morning and welcome to another Monday morning blog from myself! I hope you and your families are all safe and well and let’s hope for a return to normality very soon!

I’m going to jump straight in with this one…being the Product Manager for our tool range I find that nine times out of ten, when I’m being asked to go and show tools to engineers, it’s to help with time saving and consequently cost saving (or just because the engineers want new toys). However, that one time out of ten is for a far more interesting point, it’s to reduce RSI.

RSI, or repetitive strain injury, is an issue a particular customer contacted me about last year as his engineers were crimping hundreds of ring lugs everyday, among other ferrules and crimp styles. After some time, engineers were complaining of painful wrists, hands, fingers, and forearms resulting in some engineers being signed off to recover, consequently impacting business with a reduced workforce, but more importantly injured staff members.

This is caused by the constant squeezing of plyers all day every day which, of course, could also be made worse with bad quality tools. If you use crimping plyers on a daily basis, you know what I’m talking about. Unless you’ve got the arms of Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson of course, then you may struggle to empathise! But for some engineers it’s a real problem over time.

So, what did I do to help? I recommend several solutions. For ferrule crimping we have a high-quality hand tool called CRIMPFOX CENTRUS 10S which has a 30% reduced force to make a crimp up to 10mm, but that’s still a hand tool. In the case above, this customer wanted a solution for ring lugs so I recommended the CF 500.

The CF 500 is a crimping machine which can do over 20 styles of crimp by changing the die. Although you still use two hands to put the crimp on the cable and place it in the machine, all the crimping force is done by a foot pedal…a bit easier than squeezing a set of plyers. Not to mention you can get a die which will cut teeth out of bridges too.

With the success of the CF 500 as a solution for the customer they looked at other areas of reducing RSI such as strippin. So we went with the WF 1000 which automatically strips a cable of up to 6mm in under half a second with only the need to insert a cable into the front of the machine…no stress!

Needless to say, we got an order for several of these machines and all is well again with a significant reduction in RSI.

We have a whole portfolio of automatic and semi-automatic tools, but you don’t need to have a sore wrist to invest in these pieces of kit. They are a huge time saver too, and they more than pay for themselves in the long game.

If you have any questions on these products or would like a MS teams meeting to discuss, my details are below.

Thanks for reading and happy crimping! 😊 

For more info, contact Andy on 07786 252414 or email aneat@phoenixcontact.com