Most manufacturers produces crimped and straight lead pairs of their capacitors which has exactly same capacitance and voltage rating. Why do they bother crimping the leads? What advantage does it make? In which cases a crimped lead capacitor should be preferred?
Best Answer
Ceramic capacitors are rather brittle and so they do not like their leads getting tugged on. Adding these crimps forces the capacitor to sit off the board with a few mm of relatively flexible lead in between. This will isolate the capacitor from forces that it would otherwise experience during vibration, board flexing/bending, thermal expansion/contraction, etc. By providing the crimped leads at the factory, the board house does not require a machine to add those in-house.