gates powergrip clamps
 

Has anyone used or heard anything about these? The idea looks interesting. You have to replace the "clamps" each time but it does look pretty neat.

http://www.gatesracing.com/images/hose3mid.jpg

OK nobody? These are basically shrinkwrap compression sleeves that are used for coolant tubes. You have to remove them with a soldering iron or the Gates tool.

So, they're 6x the price of a worm-screw clamp, don't appear to have any rating on clamping force (which is important when you're doing things like using SAE hose on metric cars), require a heat-gun to install (hello, melted fan shroud), require a special tool to remove (which I'm certain you won't have forgotten when you need to change a hose trackside), and are not reusable.

Sounds like a winner to me.

Seriously, you can get some really nice mechanical clamps for that price. The ones Bell uses on their radiator hoses are practically T-bolts. No special tools, no melting anything, reusable, and strong enough to hold a dolphin to a stripper pole.

You dont want the worm screw clamp on your heater hoses, you want the regular squeeze type. You want something that can flex/stretch but still hold same amount of pressure when the hoses expand and soften up.

Archived. Thank you.