I have been telling people for years that swage fittings are stronger than mechanical fittings based on an article I read from Good Old Boat magazine that was written back in the 90’s. The article compared Sta-Lok and Norseman fittings to standard swage fittings. In their tests, the swages achieved 100% of the breaking strength of the wire. While the mechanicals performed somewhat worse with the Sta-Lok out performing the Norseman significantly.
So I finally got around to checking it out for myself. In a very crude but I think effective test, I installed a used Sta-Lok eye terminal onto a short piece of 1x19 wire that had an aircraft fork swaged onto it and pulled it with the boom truck until something gave. Listen for the weird noise when it breaks.
Here’s the video.
