Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I am an IT Manager for a large manufacturing company. I have ten full time employees that work for me and we spend a significant amount of our time pulling wire and terminating cables. To give you an idea on volume in the last year we went through over 30,000 feet of Cat5e cable. I am always looking for ways to save time and improve the quality of our work. Recently I decided that I needed to lighten my personal wiring bag and one of the larger/heavier items in it is my Cat5E crimper. My search for a replacement brought me to the Klein Tools Pass Thru Modular Wire Crimper. The idea intrigues me as the pass thru connectors take one step out of the termination process and ensures that the conductors are long enough prior to crimping. So in theory the concept saves time, improves the quality of our work, and the crimper is smaller/lighter as well. What isn't to like? The connectors are slightly more expensive but if it improves our workflow then there is still an advantage. I purchased the crimper and it arrived as expected but the first unit that I received had some issues. The biggest issue is that the cables made with this crimper fail qualification. I have tested the cables with a Fluke CableIQ and an Ideal SignalTEK NT. Both of these are well respected cable qualifiers in the industry. I also tested the cables with a Siemon SMT-8 and it failed there as well. Now the STM-8 is an older tester and not on par with the other two testers so I didn't read too much into that. The second issue is that the crimper won't trim pins one and eight when the cable is crimped. I had one of my most experienced techs try it as well and he had the same issues. We went through half a box of connectors trying to see if it was a flaw in our process or if it was the crimper itself. We did try multiple sources of cable in our evaluation. I returned this crimper to Amazon and requested a replacement. The second Klein Tools Pass Thru Modular Wire Crimper arrived and we went through our evaluation again. Cables crimped with the crimper now pass qualification with the Fluke and Ideal qualifiers but they still fail on the Siemon. The second crimper also fails to trim pins one and eight so the conductors have to manually trimmed or broken off. One last detail is that this crimper has been awkward for my tech and I to use. But to be fair, we have both been terminating cables for years. I have nearly twenty years experience and he has over ten years experience. If you have been using the same style of crimper as long as we have then changing to anything new will require some adjustment. I really like the idea of the pass thru connectors but I cannot confidently allow this crimper to be used in our production environment. That is why I have given it two stars and I will continue to look for a faster and better tool to terminate Ethernet cables.