Electronic – How to crimp ferrules without a tool

Most important tool:

• A quality soldering iron. Mine's a Weller. Those Radio Shack pencil irons are useless, and will only make life more difficult.
• A wet sponge for cleaning the iron tip, several tips for the iron.
• Both desoldering braid and a solder sucker.

• Plenty of 60/40 solder, the silver bearing stuff doesn't flow nearly as well. A well stocked junkbox is extremely important. The more components you have to hand, the faster you can work.

• A good digital multimeter, I love my Fluke. Add to that a good analog multimeter, digital meters offer no sense of change over time.

• A dual channel 100MHz oscilloscope (mine's a tektronix mainframe that I scavenged).
• Good lighting! A third-hand rig or similar to hold parts and boards that are being soldered.
• A spectrum analyzer is very useful for radio work.
• A function generator.
• A sharp pair of flush cutting nippers.
• Several spools of different coloured 20 gauge hookup wire.
• Some people keep flux to hand, but I've never found I needed it.
• Assorted scraps of printed circuit board, or strip board - breadboards are very finicky and can add circuit-killing parasitic capacitance.
• The absolute best tool I've found for cutting PCB is a jeweler's saw. You can buy them from Contenti, and aren't very expensive. I've never seen anything use produce a better or faster cut.

I think that covers the bulk of it, it may seem like a lot of stuff but it's mostly small stuff. An LCR meter is handy, too. I have a foredom flexshaft, it's kind of like a Dremel but more powerful and higher quality. They're not cheap machines, but are a real life saver for modifying circuit boards.

Look up Molex KK Connector kits on a site such as Mouser. (For example, 538-MXKK-100.) You may notice that some of the kits include a crimp tool. I discovered that these crimp tools are also available separately. While they are not the $300 optimal model, they do work well and are a tenth the price. The kit I linked, contains Molex Part No. 63811-1000 which is less than $40.

Personally, I bought a crimp tool (#1928) from Pololu.com for $35 and think it does a great job with Molex KK connectors. However, I also bought some of the crimp pins and housings from Pololu and do not recommend them. The Molex brand, while more expensive, is superior in quality.

Last but not least, I requested some samples of various 100 mil headers and housings direct from Molex and was pleasantly surprised when I received a small box of parts just two days later. Highly recommended if you need to test a few connector types before you make a big purchase.

Edit:

Not many places show the beginner how to actually crimp the pins for these type of connectors. There is, fortunately, a quick video that shows hand-crimping small KK pins.