Took me 3 years to figure out I was stripping coax wrong

Been doing cable installs for a local company near Austin since 2021. Always used the cheap crimpers from the hardware store and wondered why half my connectors would fail within a month. Last week a veteran tech watched me strip a line and just said "you're crushing the dielectric every time." He handed me a proper compression tool and I haven't had a single bad termination since. Anybody else have that one dumb mistake that took way too long to catch?

2 comments

2 Comments

tylerr3919d ago

Man I've got a buddy who did the same thing but with network cables. He was punching down keystone jacks for like two years and always had intermittent connectivity issues. Turned out he was using a cheap impact tool that wasn't seating the wires all the way. Finally borrowed a decent one from a coworker and felt like an idiot when everything worked perfect after that lmao. It's wild how much a simple tool change can save you hours of troubleshooting.

alex52418d ago

Did you ever try fixing the punch with just your thumb like I did, because I was too cheap to buy ANY tool? Took me way too long to realize that's not how cables work, oops.