Just found out my crimper was misaligned for 6 months

I was checking a customer's drop yesterday and noticed some intermittent signal loss, so I swapped out the connector and boom, issue gone. Looked closer at my old connector under a lamp and saw the crimp was off center by about half a millimeter every time. Has anyone else calibrated their crimper lately and found a hidden problem in their own work?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_miles1mo ago

Honestly that's a rough one but it happens to the best of us. I had a similar thing happen with my cable tester once, turned out the internal contacts were just slightly bent and it was passing cables that were total garbage. I started keeping a "known good" cable in my bag specifically to check my tools against every few weeks. Took a whole lot of headaches out of the mix once I got into that habit.

the_eva1mo ago

Not really seeing it the same way @the_miles. A known good cable is smart but it only checks if your tester is working, not if the tester is accurate. Those cheap testers drift over time and a reference cable won't catch that drift. You could have a tester that passes everything including bad cables and still passes your reference cable, then you're right back where you started. Calibration matters more than a known good cable for stuff like that.