Written by Andy Neat, Product Manager- Marking & Installation

Over the last 4 years, I must admit that one of the best parts of my job is looking after the Phoenix Contact tool range.  Not just because it comes in handy when changing a plug socket at home, but because there’s something oddly satisfying about playing and testing out top quality tooling on a daily basis.  But, then again, I am the guy who couldn’t wait to rip his skirting boards off at home so I had an excuse to buy a new circular saw to fit the new skirting.

But, today, I’m not talking about the ground breaking hand tools such as Crimpfox 4in1 or Crimpfox Centrus (name-drop) but I’m going to talk about an unlikely partnership I’ve noticed over the years occurring in our automatic tool range. I say it’s unlikely because they both do  completely different jobs, but work very well together. No, I’m not talking about Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the film ‘Twins’ here, I’m talking about The CF 3000 and CUTFOX 10.

What are the CF 3000 and CUTFOX 10? Lets start with the CF 3000. I’ve blogged about this tool before so sorry if I repeat myself here. The CF 3000 will strip and crimp a cable in less than 2 seconds!! I could leave it there but there is more. It can crimp 0.5mm upto 2.5mm cable leaving a square crimping result.

A study showed that the average panel builder can strip and crimp around 5 cables a minute (I have seen a guy do it quicker) whereas the CF 3000 can do up to 25 a minute! With my rough estimations, if you are terminating, say, 700 cables in a panel- I’m going to give the panel builder the benefit of the doubt and say he/she can assemble 8 cables a minute (that’s stripped and crimped)- so it would take approximately 90 minutes to assemble all the cables give or take a minute or two for fiddling about and sipping brews. With the CF 3000, which is bench mounted (requires mains power) so a bit of walking back and forth may be required, straight away the assembly time is reduced to 35 minutes, or let’s say 40-45 minutes as your colleague may have asked you about the football last night. So based on just assembling the cables that’s around a 50% time saving straight away.

So where does the CUTFOX 10 come into this?  Some poor sole has to cut all the cable to size.  You can forget about the steel ruler you have screwed to your work bench as the CUTFOX 10 will measure it all out for you. There’s a handy little touch screen on the top of the device allowing you to insert quantity and length then just hit ‘start’ and walk off to sweep the floor, maybe.  In my opinion, the time saving here is only a slight one between machine and a human cutting the cable, but the point is it’s completely automatic so you can walk off and leave it, that’s where the time saving comes in…and finger saver you might say!

So an unlikely partnership as I said earlier. These two machines have been purchased together more and more as an unofficial set as there is a clear time/cost saving benefit for machine builders and panel builders for compete cable assembly time. We could go one further and say let’s look at our Push-in terminals too, where you would save even more time when it comes to the installation side, but I’ll leave that blog for my colleague Scott 🙂

So if it’s Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger or perhaps even Peter Crouch and Jermain Defoe getting the job done, either way if it works it works.

For more information, contact Andy by email aneat@phoenixcontact.com or telephone 07786 252414