Unique terminal lug source?

Corbet

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I’m in need of a unique terminal lug for 4 awg wire. I pulled this image from a Chinese source that probably only sells them by the metric ton. I only need one. Plus there was not any real info there.

But anyway. I need a 90° tab. It’s easy to find them with the bend on the other axis but like this seems to be difficult to source.

Anyone have a direction to point me? Otherwise I’ll have to make one.

IMG_1507.jpeg
 

Corbet

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nuclearlemon

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check e & g terminal over by sapp brothers in denver. if anyone has flag terminals, they will
 

Corbet

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Cruisertrash

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"Flag terminal" is probably going to get you in the ballpark. Check Mouser and learn to navigate their search functionality!
 

allen.wrench

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Have you considered using copper tubing? Bend it to 90 deg, smash one end flat, drill hole you need in that flat end, and crimp the open end to your cable.

Not ideal, but for a single unique terminal could work well enough. Copper is generally easy to anneal using a blow torch, and it is very ductile in the annealed state. Uncle Google says a 4 AWG bare conductor is about 0.2" OD, and the ID of a 1/4" copper tube is about 0.19" dependent on the wall thickness. There is generally wiggle room between strands of a large conductor like 4AWG, so even though nominal size might be larger than the ID of the tube, I would bet it will fit and/or you can make it fit without real issue.

Allen
 

DaveInDenver

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Those Burndy-type flag terminals are commonly used by the utility guys and a little less so industrially and commercially. They take a slightly different set of dies than more common compression terminals. Whenever I've used them I've had the right tooling but admittedly this is exceedingly rare, it's usually the RE (Real Electrician) and not the EE (Electrical Engineer) doing the work that would require them.

Never tried one in the set of tri-form FTZ crimpers (designed for the MagnaLug type crimp) I have personally. Might work, might not. No idea.

Screenshot 2026-09-11 at 11.44.42.png





Using copper tubing and pipe for electrical terminals isn't as strange as it sounds. A tube is basically how some types of them look before being stamped into shape. Tyco and Molex would draw the tube to the exact diameters they need but if you use a wire gauge that happens to match the tube or pipe there's no reason it couldn't work. There's many ways lugs are made. Some are flat blanks where the cable end is rolled, some are cast. Look at the flat end, sometimes you'll see it's obviously stamped flat, like this Panduit tubular lug.

Untitled.jpg

The thing to calculate is cross section of pipe/tube. You need enough material to do the job. A 4 AWG has a spec OD of 0.2043 inches and 41,738 cmil of cross section, which is roughly 0.033 sq-in.

Soft copper 1/4" ACR with OD of 0.25" and ID of 0.190" would have 0.022 sq-in cross section of copper, so technically the amount of material in the flattened tab would be less than the wire, around the equivalent of between 5 and 6 AWG wire. Not ideal but honestly likely no worse than cheap hardware store terminals, some of them do indeed have very thin walls that I find difficult to crimp well. The dies are sized based on the assumption of wall thickness and when it's exceptionally thin you may have to use the next smaller size and stop the tool before it fully closes.

Some dimensions for hard copper plumbing pipe.

20200122061010_39982.png

36d67a96d9ed3d99202f93edb16de1ba.jpg

Also for the soft refrigeration copper tubing you get in coils.

table-image-k2-1503x1536.jpg
 
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Corbet

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I've decided to adjust my installation design and now I should be able to utilize a standard terminal lug. We'll see how it goes this weekend. It won't be as clean on the outside but is more reversible if I choose to do so in the future. Just waiting for a couple things to arrive from amazon before I get started.
 

DaveInDenver

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