On Mon, 14 Jul 2014 08:09:23 -0700, Carla Fong
wrote:

Hi all -

I looked for a newsgroup about hydraulics but didn't find one... so here
we are...

We are in the process of repairing a truck mounted hydraulic crane (an
old power company rig that digs holes, sets poles and generally does
lots of stuff).

Yesterday I replaced two of the approximately 3,218 hydraulic hoses on
the rig and paid about $100 for them. Since there will be more hoses to
replace as we get into the project (and we also have a backhoe with
aging hoses that will need some attention in the future) we are
considering getting the tooling to do our own hoses.

The crimping machines seem godawful expensive - and there seem to be two
or three manufacturers (Parker, Weatherhead, Gates, etc.) with
apparently incompatible fittings and crimping dies...

Is tooling up for what we want to do reasonable for the amount of hoses
we will be making or is it more cost effective to run down to the auto
parts and have them made for us as needed?

Anybody do/done this and have any words of wisdom?

Thanks in advance

Carla

Pick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any
order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can
do without. Milton Friedman

You are going to need to crimp a LOT of hose to make buying a Parker
Hannefin crimper anything close to affordable!!!! However, there are
hand operated units that could make sense - particularly if only 1 or
2 different size dies are required. What does it cost to have an end
installed (not counting the end)? How many ends? Not hard to figure
out how much you can afford to spend on a crimper and still come out
ahead