I pulled all the big wires out to redo them.
This is a 4 step process...takes a looong time!
1. I tin the wire end and then once it is completely saturated with solder, I then "flick out" all the solder I can get out of the tinned end.
2. I compress all the strands together with a crimper. This closes up all the small gaps left behind between the wire strands. The tinned wire will retain this compressed state. The red wire end below is pressed together, but not reduced. Before doing this the untinned end is probably 20% larger than the tinned and compressed end.
3, Using a file, I slowly reduce the wire end to just barely fit in the through hole. A tight fit is what I'm looking for so that I preserve as much of the 8 awg wire as possible. Filing the end down could be fast if I didn't care about getting a very tight fit in the hole. The wire end is larger than a 10 awg wire.
4. Once I have the wire end to the right diameter, I put heat shrink around the silicon insulation and over lapping the end a little so it shrinks around any loose strands that might come apart when the wire is soldered in place.
I think the above process while taking longer to do will also hold up better than this first method. I've completely eliminated the crimp-on berrol and no longer have a short section of 10 awg wire anymore. This allows for more wire flexibility closer to the board and keeps the wires from pressing on the roof of the controller so much.
While writing the above stuff, I thought of compressing down the end of a crimp berrol. I have several sizes of crimpers so I kept compressing the end together tighter and tighter just now. I was able to get the end to exactly the size of the through holes in the board. Now I don't need to file on the wires anymore, just tin them and solder them into the berrol. Push the compressed end of the berrol into the through hole and solder it in place. This is not as close to the board as reducing the wire end, but it's a lot faster and I'm still reducing about 1/4 of vertical length. Compressing that end down took a minute at most. Reducing down the wire end takes 20 minutes to get a perfect fit. Time to redo the 3 phase wires like this. BATT+ and BATT- have not been reduced yet.
Getting the berrol end crunched down like the left part is the hardest to do. It takes going back and forth around the diameter to get it to crush together.
I move to a smaller crimper to get to this slightly more compressed left part. There's still air gaps and voids in there. To get to that final size on one of my crimpers on the jaws it says ".1". That's the final compressing that gets the end to final size.
This took just a few minutes to compress down 5 berrols. While I was at it, I compressed half the length of the berrol so they would be a bit shorter when installed in the board. Extra length will get snipped off after they are soldered in. I wish I would have thought of this sooner!