How to Crimp Speaker Wire
By Adam Raphael
Crimping is a solderless method for you to terminate your connectors and wires. Most people fear the crimping process will be too complicated for them to do. It involves plastic and elastic deformation, as well as knowing a thing or two about how metals work. However, crimping speaker wires is not as difficult as it sounds. You just need to take into consideration the insulation material support as well as the wire interaction during the crimping process. Knowing how to properly crimp your speaker wire will help improve your speaker's durability, especially in harsh environments.
Use your colored sticky tabs to label each speaker wire for easier notation.
Check the wire size found at the side of the cable and match it with your crimping connector. Insert the wire into your wire crimping tool gauge if there is no size listed, and use the hole size that fits your wire as your gauge size.
Strip off around 1/4 inch of your wire insulation by using your wire stripper. This will expose the metal wire inside the speaker cable. Repeat the same step for each of the wires that you will crimp together.
Hold onto both ends of the bare wire and insert them into your crimping connector. See to it that there is one wire for each end.
Check the wire crimping connector size and match it to its respective slot in your wire crimper.
Get the crimping connector containing the wires and place it into the middle of your proper wire crimper slot. You will see this area marked on your wire crimper, beside every slot.
Squeeze the handles of your wire crimper for its tips to draw into a close. The crimping connector will then shut close on both of the wires, completing the crimping process.
References
Tips
- Each wire crimper slot fits a connector with a totally different size. Make sure to check on the size of your connector prior to placing your crimping connector into the slot.
- See to it that you match the wires according to the colored sticky tabs to avoid incorrect or faulty connections.
Writer Bio
Adam Raphael has been writing technical and health-related articles for a variety of online sources for five years. His articles have appeared on a variety of popular blogs and other websites.