Vintage Sears AMP Wire Stripper and Crimping Tool, c. 1965–1984

The Piece

A multi purpose electrician's tool from the years when one stamped steel plier did the work of five, made by AMP Incorporated of Harrisburg and sold under the Sears name.

Both faces are covered in instruction. On the front, crimping nests at the nose marked 22-14 against a red dot and 12-10 against a blue, with an INS. position beside them carrying blue and yellow dots for insulated terminals. Below that a head plate tapped and marked INSERT SCREW HERE with five threaded holes, 10-24, 10-32, 8-32, 6-32 and 4-40, for sizing and cutting a screw without mangling the thread. Further down, STUD SIZES set out in two columns, 3 over 8, 1 over 4, 10 and 6 on one side, 5 over 16, 12, 8 and 4 on the other, so a man could match a ring terminal to the post he was putting it on without leaving the ladder.

Turn it over and the other face carries the cutting work. WIRE CUTTER across the throat, a STRIPPING GAGE with arrows and marks for 12 to 10 and 22 to 14, and down the centre a row of bolt cutting holes labelled COMMERCIAL A.W.G., 7 MM, and 1 to 6, 1 to 4 and 1 to 2. CLOSE and HERE with arrows appear on both sides, because the tool expected to be read by someone who had never seen one.

The jaws are stamped steel finished in black oxide with the lettering picked out in white. The handles are pressed steel painted a light grey, ribbed for grip, riveted through at the pivot and again at the tail, and one of them carries the Sears wordmark in blue inside a thin rectangular frame. Just above the pivot sits the stepped steel cutting insert, still bright where the black has worn off it.

History & Provenance

Two names on one tool, which is what makes it datable. AMP began in 1941 as Aircraft and Marine Products, formed to make solderless electrical connections for aircraft and ships, and it was the firm that took the crimped terminal from a wartime expedient to the standard way every wire in America got joined to every other. Sears did not make tools. Sears bought them from firms like AMP and put its own name on the handle, and that is what happened here.

The maker's name sets the floor. The tool is marked AMP INCORPORATED, and the company only took that name in 1956 when it re-incorporated. Before that it was Aircraft and Marine Products. Anything stamped AMP INCORPORATED is 1956 or later, and the outside edge runs to 1999, when Tyco International bought the company and the AMP name went with it.

The Sears wordmark narrows it considerably. The name is set in lowercase inside a thin rectangular frame, which is the form Sears used from the middle nineteen sixties until the frame was dropped in the mid eighties in favour of a plain wordmark. Overlap the two marks and the window closes to about twenty years.

On that evidence it is offered as c. 1965 to 1984. Three things would narrow it further: whether a Sears catalogue or stock number survives anywhere on the handles, whether the handle paint is original or a refinish, and whether the tool matches a dated Sears catalogue page, which is how tools of this kind are usually pinned to a single year.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

It still does the job. A crimper is a crimper, the AWG sizes have not changed, and this will terminate a lamp cord or a trailer harness as well as it did the day it was sold. For anyone rewiring old lighting, which is most of the trade, it earns its bench space.

The instructions are the charm. Every surface is covered in white lettering telling you what to do and where to close it, laid out with an optimism about the home electrician that no modern tool bothers with, and that density of type on black steel is why these photograph so well in a flat lay or a shadow box.

And it is honest American manufacturing with two names you can trace. AMP of Harrisburg invented much of how wire gets joined in this country, and Sears put it in a million basements. At this size it sits in a tool roll, on a pegboard or in a frame, and it costs less than any of them are worth.