All right, today we're making a 220 volt extension cord. What you'll need are the
female and male ends of the appropriate plug. I am making a NEMA 6-50, 10 gauge wire. I'm also gonna
need a screwdriver, some wire strippers, and an exacto knife... But I don't know where mine is,
so I'm using my pocket knife. It's just for removing some of the sheathing on this anyway. So
let's go ahead and get started. I want to clarify something before we get too far into this, I'm
using 10 gauge wire and, I would like to point out that the instructions say can be used for either
30 amp, or 50 amp service, and I am using this for 30 amp service. If you're going to be hitting that
50 amps, that 250 volts at 50 amps... You're going to want 6 gauge wire not 10 gauge wire.
All right, so I've removed the exterior sheathing from this wire and as you can see we have a black
a white a red and a ground. Now with this receptacle we're only going to need three
of the four so we'll use black white and ground. Okay so now we're going to open up the male end
of the extension cord by removing the screws on either side of these. And again I should
say that you can pick up these at pretty much any big hardware store same with the wire.
Okay so it just popped open there, and as you can see inside we have the terminals
to attach our wires to. This is the clamp to hold the wire in place so you're not
tugging on the terminals when you move it around and this goes inside of there to apply some some
cushioning and pressure as well. I'm just going to substitute the red for the ground
and not use the ground so I'm going to clip that off right now because we don't need it.
And again I'll point out that because I'm making an extension cord for my own use,
I'm not going to have to worry about running this through a wall and then worrying about some future
electrician opening up the outlet and seeing the wrong colors and not knowing what they're doing.
This is going to be pretty straightforward as to what's going where
so now that we have that we should line up where the three are going to go in here so
we want black, white, and green... Or in our case red. So knowing that's what we want to do
when this comes through here the wires go to their appropriate locations you're going to want enough
space or I guess enough room that they all fit there comfortably. So we'll have to cut
this one shorter we'll have to cut this one shorter and we're going to turn this one
and remove the sheath so it fits in properly so let's see how that looks once we do that
okay, I've gone ahead and stripped the wires and we can see that they will actually line up
quite nicely with where they need to go instead of trying to finagle these in here like this
what you do is you in fact just pull these out one by one. So I'll be able to put the wire in
and tighten it down and get it nice. And then I can put this back in
one by two one by one at a time and make sure the wire is in the right spot at the same time
I'll run the wire through here so I can grip it. So the first step is to make sure that this is
actually around the wire so when you're pulling on it you're pulling on here and not the connections.
Okay I have the three attached, and I'll have you know that I just used a tiny little screwdriver to
tighten it hand tight and then, I can't reach around the camera to tighten it really good,
so I took it off camera and I really tighten these on really, really, good, good solid connection.
You'd want to make sure they're on quite nicely.
Okay, took some finagling but they're all back in their proper spot look on the other side here
we can see we have the posts coming through I just want to make sure this really is in the right spot
before I push this back down. So I'll clamp this back down and we'll have lots of tension
or lots of pressure right here so if you pull on the cord you're not pulling on
these posts you're pulling on the entire bundle held in place with this bracket.
All right, yeah, that's nice and tight.
It's got it right by the the wire there so we are good to put the cover back on.
And there you have it, that is one one end done that is the male end of our
center cord done let's just see how it fits...
There we go, it does fit. So that's a good sign.
All right, let's move on to the other end which is this end and I have the one in the center here.
And there we go. And we have another gripper we should be very familiar with this already,
this will wrap around the wire itself so we'll put that inside there and make sure there's enough
give that when you pull, this will hit the bottom of the whole unit and move the unit as opposed to
pulling on those those outlets. Screwdriver in here, and pop this out so we're gonna pop that
off the the bottom here because we're not gonna use it. In this particular model I could have
popped it off the back if I was gonna go out that direction but I'm not. I'm going through
the bottom. So yeah, we'll be able to run the wire through and I want to point out that I'm actually
leaving this in the same orientation that I'm working on the receptacle,
and the reason for that is I don't want to mess up my wire choices. Obviously, the red
I remember is my ground even though it should be green so I'm going to put the ground to here
but what about white or black you know. I know I did black on this side, and white on this side.
"B"lack the "B"igger terminal, so that's how I remember black is big. So I know that the bigger
terminal is on the left, so I want to line up the black with the black. So this will be black,
this will be white, kind of a tip there for you to keep keep track of which way you're going.
Okay, so as we did before, we're using the red as our ground so we don't need this at this point.
And we're going to do more of the same. We're going to bring the wire through,
we are going to line up where we want to have each of these go, and we are going to
remove the cut the wire to the right length and remove the sheathing. Okay,
so I have them I line them all up. I cut them to length I stripped them so they were exposed,
and now I'm going to insert them into the proper areas here on the outlet. So these
terminals, the way that they connect to the wire is: They slide open, you feed the wire into the
area here, you let it rest in the middle, you close it, there's a little portal where it snaps
closed so when you tighten these they don't push up, and then they'll hold the wires in place. So
I'm going to go ahead and do that and we'll fast forward to what it looks like when that's done.
Okay, there we go. I have the three wires in the proper locations again, black, red as our ground,
and white to go with "B" Big for Black, red is our ground, and white...
So when that goes on there it'll line up right. And I have tightened these to the point that my
hand is sore. You want to make sure these have a really good, great connection so don't be
afraid to give it a lot of muscle... Get it as tight as you can. Get it... This is the one...
Okay, yeah, definitely not going to get much tighter than that.
So I'm gonna be able to yeah put this back together and I think we are gonna be laughing.
Okay we're back in the saddle now, this isn't going to be outside. It's a semi-permanent
solution for a specific purpose I'm not using this as a as a do-all or a catch-all.
When you're building your own make sure you use, you know, you build it for your
own use. These typically, if you are going to keep it around for use for multiple things,
build it to that 50 amp capacity. The real takeaway from all of this is,
build something to your own specific needs. This video is meant to act as a mere guide. Hopefully
it gives you the fundamentals and the ideas on how to research this further, and do it yourself
properly and safely, along with proper training of course. So, until next time, if the women
don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy! Keep your stick on the ice.