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by HeyLaughingBoy 788 days ago
> its probably worth buying your own set of crimp tools

I used to make a product that required a wire harness with about 50 conductors (TBF, half of them were Ground). I'm not Toyota, just some dude in a basement, but I found an outfit that would cut to length & strip wire and crimp on the terminals I specified, for less than it cost me to just buy the wire myself. Economies of scale FTW! Unfortunately, that company was bought by another and they no longer make wire assemblies for outside businesses.

Crimping wires in bulk reliably is slow and time consuming if you're doing it by hand, even with the right tools (expensive too). It's generally better to have a supplier with automated tools do it: even the terminal manufacturers seem to think of their manual tooling as second-class citizens. Digi-key has a pretty wide selection of off the shelf crimped wires; I think Pololu does also.

Like you said, there's not a lot of demand and it seems like the harness manufacturers are dying off.