Yea, I can see that, I have hydraulic as well, and it's not fast in any way to crimp an end on - both the 'fiddly'ness of trying to hold everything in the right place and then the actual hydraulic pumping to do the crimp, but it was relatively affordable, and the quality of the crimps are top notch.dcmachinist wrote: Sun Jul 09, 2023 7:30 am I've got two hydraulics in different sizes and I rarely use them. I prefer mechanical crimpers because I can feel the pressure much better and they are MUCH faster. Someone will want it though. Hydraulic is nice for really large lugs but I rarely crimp over 1 gauge. I use a telescopic Temco for my 1 and 2 gauge and an old Thomas and Betts WT115 for my 4 and 6 gauge.
It is interesting to see how the tools have changed over the years though, there was a time that the only option for doing 'large' gauge (in the auto world) crimps was to use a hammer (or if you were fancy a hammer crimper) as the crimp tools cost many hundreds of dollars and weren't that good. Or you took your wire/terminals to somebody who had the tools and begged/bribed to use them.
I don't know the 968, but the (later) 944 cables aren't that big, the cables are all in metric, but they work out to being 2 ga for the battery/starter cable and about 6ga for the alternator/starter cable. I gave up on the 1ga battery cable, it was just too stiff to run around, and went back to 2ga...I did leave the 4ga for the alternator cable, but it was flexible enough.
Given the current draw and lengths, those are more than adequate to handle the loads the car will normally encounter. Now the routing in some cases is a little suspect, and then a modern cable will have better sheathing, plus you can run the cable in more protective sleeving. The biggest problem I've seen with the cables is simply them aging out, everything gets brittle after that many years, the ground cables that came out of my car, the sheathing was breaking apart in my hands. The power side was still in relatively good shape (thankfully). The other 'problem' is you never know who did what in the cars past, and 944's are notorious in the P-car world for having some janky repairs done to them, so always worth checking out what was done.
