Mcintosh provide the plastic wrench it's a short handle as to not over tighten.. I just use black round foam to make the bridge. To take the weight off the binding post..I bought a set of 30 foot the other day used at a great price.happy listening.parts express sells a bananna that has a threaded nut on the end and I sometimes put the spade on that.
Securing spade connectors
I’ve just picked up a pair of my favorite speaker cables, Transparent Super, on the used market for a great price. Unlike my old pair, these have spade connectors.
So it took me maybe 30 minutes to get these cables connected, the actual speaker cables and the network boxes etc are so heavy that it’s extremely difficult to prevent the spade from slipping out of the post. So I’d screw down a speaker side and then the amp end would slide out.
And thanks to the design of the Transparent cables, the 2 ends are harder to work with because the positive and negative ends are just about 5” long where they split from the main cable, so they are extremely difficult to position and work with. And my speakers have spade jumpers so I’m double stacking the spades on the speaker side which makes it twice as hard to screw down.
I know I can probably send these back to Transparent to get re-terminated but there must be a way to make the spade connectors work… is there a better way to connect these big bastards - do people actually use wrenches to torque down the binding connector posts or is there some kind of trick to make it easier?