Review on Klein Tools VDV226-110 Ratcheting Crimper/Stripper/Cutter for RJ11/RJ12 & RJ45 Connectors by Eric Garron

I am the IT Manager for a large manufacturing company. I have ten full-time employees who work for me, and we spend a lot of time pulling wires and terminating cables. To give you an idea of the volume, we ran over 30,000 feet of Cat5e cable last year. I'm always looking for ways to save time and improve the quality of our work. I've recently decided that I need to lighten up my personal wire bag and one of the largest and heaviest items in it is my Cat5E crimping tool. My search for a replacement led me to the Klein Tools Pass Thru Modular Crimping Machine. I was intrigued by the idea as pass-through connectors take a step out of the termination process and ensure the conductors are of sufficient length before they are crimped. So, in theory, this concept saves time, improves the quality of our work, and the crimping machine is also smaller and lighter. What's not to like? The connectors are a bit more expensive, but if it improves our workflow then the benefit is still there. I bought a crimping tool and it arrived as expected, but the first tool I received had some issues. The biggest problem is that the cables made with this crimping machine are not suitable. I tested the cables with Fluke CableIQ and Ideal SignalTEK NT. Both are industry recognized cable qualifiers. I also tested cables with Siemon SMT-8 and it didn't work there either. Now the STM-8 is an older tester and not on par with the other two testers, so I didn't elaborate on that. The second problem is that the crimping tool does not cut pins one and eight when the cable is crimped. I also asked one of my most experienced techs to try it and he had the same issues. We went through half a box of connectors trying to figure out if it was an error in our process or the crimping tool itself. We tried several cable sources in our review. I returned this crimping tool to Revain and requested a replacement. Klein Tools' second Pass Thru modular crimp tool has arrived and we've passed our review again. Crimped leads now qualify with Fluke and Ideal qualifiers but still fail the Siemon qualification. Also, the second crimping tool cannot cut pins one and eight, so the conductors must be cut or broken off by hand. The last detail is that this crimping tool was inconvenient for my technician and for me. But to be honest, we've both been doing cable terminations for years. I have almost twenty years of experience and he has over ten years of experience. If you use the same type of crimping tool as we do, switching to something new will require some adjustments. I really like the idea of pass-through connectors, but I can't confidently allow this crimping tool in our production environment. For that reason I gave it two stars and will continue to search for a faster and better ethernet cable termination tool.