Mastering the Crimp Tool

I spent some (oh, alright, quite a lot) of today fiddling with hardware, as is my wont. I've been buying cables with ready fitted pins and sockets on them, but last week I thought that it might be useful if I could crimp my own pins, so to speak. So I bought a crimp tool like this one.

The theory is/was that I could make up custom cables of just the right length and with just the right arrangement of plugs and sockets on each end to fit in what ever I was building. And it sort of works. There's a very useful howto on the Hobbytronics web site and by the end of the day I was able to make pretty good connections, which is nice.

Having said that, you can get ready made cables of ebay for around 3 pounds each, which give you forty connections, and so I think I'll just get this out for special occasions. It's one thing to be able to use it, but another to have to do it a lot.