Today i'm going to look at the ft-45 crimping tool from ideal industries
the keyeyed amongst you might think I've already seen that on the channel and you would be right we
used it in our home networking series of videos in those videos we tried to suggest to electricians
wiring domestic dwellings that pulling cat5 or cat6 cables in and creating a home networking
system was a great upsell i fell in love with the tool at that stage the reason being i'm only an
occasional crimper of the rj45s and this tool made it easier for me to make those connections
and you know on the fix how we love products that make electricians life easier but don't take my
word for it let's see me use it again let's put the ft-45 from Ideal industries to work then so
first i'm going to prepare my cable the crimping tool can be used on cat5e or cat6 cables and i'm
using cat6 for this demonstration so the little string here can be used to pull down the side of
the cable in order to lengthen it i don't need it so i'm just going to lose that just cut that off
then i'm going to part my conductors so i can remove the center piece of pvc so just move those
out of the way what i'll do is i'll generally just give it a little tug just to pull it up a fraction
just fold the conductors out of the way and then snip out that centre PVC and then I can start
untwisting all the conductors so all of these need to be untwisted and when i've untwisted them
i need to make sure they're nice and straight so it's quite time consuming so
off we go now we straighten them out it's important you take your time when doing this bit
it makes it easier for the next stage so untwisted all the conductors started straightening them out
so now we can see i've got my pin here up so the gold pins are in the up position that's really
important when laying out compared to the order and on here you can see an a and a b a is the
T568a and the T568b systems and we use the b systems in the uk and there's the
color order for you we're using a feed through crimp okay so our rj45 crimp is a feed-through
variety sometimes called a modular plug also works on standard and shielded modules so i'm going to
lay the conductors in the correct order as stated in the b system which is on the side of the ft-45
checking it as i go so once i'm happy with the order always good and then i always like to snip
the ends off make them all the same length so just check the order is the order correct if it
is great if it is an old trip snip off the ends and then i'm ready to introduce my feed through
style of rj45 end so push that into position i love this bit so just get it into position
and once i'm in position just slides up and once again i will check the order
confirm that order against the side of the ft45 on the b system if i'm happy i can just push it
down into position and then use the crimping tool so i'm checking it now yeah i'm nice and
happy let's pull it down making sure we get it all the way in so we squeeze against the outer
part of the cable so it works as a cord grip in here so i'm going to make sure we're on the outer
part of the cable and now we're ready to get it in so get it right way around so we need to rotate it
into position lock it through so push it through wiggle it into position just confirm it's all the
way in once i'm all the way in okay i can then pull this arm up here which will crimp it and
cut it so because it's a feed-through variety it'll cut off the conductors we'll also use the
insulation displacement of those gold pins that we saw earlier that push into the and through the
insulation of the conductors themselves as well so that's connected now hopefully i managed to
demonstrate there what a great tool the ft-45 from ideal industries is and how much i also love this
tool as well but as always we're interested in your feedback have you been using this tool for
some time and how are you finding it and getting on with it are you thinking about buying one in
the future please leave those comments below and we'll try and get back to as many as we
can