Hello folks, been a while since I have posted here or anywhere else for that matter, I've still followed the forum and responded every now and then, but not like I used to. Family, work, and life in general have kept me extremely busy for quite some time.

Quite a few moons ago I was at a flea market, garage sale, or some other sort of used tool opportunity and picked up a set of dies for crimping hydraulic lines. Those of you familiar with these sorts of tools probably know that the dies/die sets are the expensive part of this stuff. I surmised that at some time in the future I would have a need for something like this and then put them to use. Well it took a lot of years but I finally got around to doing something with them. I imagine a lot of you have also had the pleasure of using many of the commercially available choices for crimping the retaining sleeves onto various hose end combinations. I have typically not been impressed with much of what is out there, I'm not saying that you can't find anything, but if you do, it might require a trip to the loan department at the bank to be able to pay for it.

Once I made the decision to make this stuff actually do something I needed to plan my strategy for putting everything together. Between home and the scrap supply at school I was able to find a couple of nice SS pipe fittings/flanges that would work for a portion of this build. Additionally, a length of all-thread and some nuts, a center hub to a belt shieve, a piece of SS flat bar, a chunk of thick MS plate, and an old hydraulic jack rounded out the parts. The next step was to determine the angle to machine the SS flange to so that it would provide the correct receiver piece to make the die crimp as it was designed. Once I figure that out (15 degrees, 30 degrees included angle) I bored the inside of the flange to the correct size and depth. Welded this to the chunk of MS plate and bored it through to provide clearance and access to pass the hose/fitting through so that it could be crimped. Welded the SS flat bar to cover the hole in the center of the top flange and then connected the two together with the all-thread. Used the hub center as a spacer to provide clearance for the hose end when it was being pressed by the jack between the two surfaces. Then I use a vise to clamp and hold the press in place for use. I also needed to perform some weld build-up and grinding/reshaping on the die sections to obtain a satisfactory crimp for my particular purpose (the die was slightly oversize for my intended purpose). 

To use this monstrosity you have to install the die into the tapered hole and then from the bottom, pass the hose up through and orient it at the correct depth before pressing. Next step is to place the hub center over the hose fitting and centered on the die and then place the jack in position and apply jacking pressure until you feel it come up solid. After releasing the pressure on the jack, removing it and the hub center, you can lightly push up from the bottom of the press against the dies and remove the finished hose end.

I am including some pictures to better explain/illustrate this whole thing. Best regards everyone, Allan

Edit: sorry about the picture quality, after I got done snapping these I noticed that I hadn't enabled the macro setting on the camera.