I DIYed my own lugs using soft copper tubing and I also designed my own "crimp" tool sort of borrowing an idea from looking at the design of a hammer type crimper.
Crimped the soft copper tubing to the wire, then I soldered the tubing to the wire. This way I get a good mechanical connection (crimp) and a good electrical connection (solder). The best of both worlds..
I can assure you that my homemade lugs are far superior to pretty much any commercial lugs I looked at for the given wire size I was working with..
You can take a look at a PDF document that I put together documenting how to do this properly
HERE
