Whether you're looking to repair a damaged network cable or to make your own
custom length network cables there are of course some tools and supplies you're going to need.
First of all you're going to need a network cable.
If you're repairing a damaged cable then you'll have this item ready to go obviously,
but if you're wanting to make a custom length cable you'll need to buy some CAT5e or
CAT6 cabling from your local hardware store or get some from somewhere else.
I got into making my own custom cables because my Dad owned a construction company and the low
voltage electricians would always leave behind what I felt were very usable pieces of cable,
but I digress.
Second you're going to want a pair of wire cutters similar to these or something else
to cut the cables with. This next item isn't really required but I like to use a utility
knife to cut the sheathing off the network cable. Next you're going to need some RJ-45 connectors.
These are CAT5e connectors, if you're using CAT6 cable then you're probably going to want to use
CAT6 connectors. The last thing that you're going to need to make this job as simple as possible is
a crimp tool similar to this one which is used to attach the RJ-45 connectors to our cable.
You should be able to find all these tools and supplies at your local hardware store
but I've also placed links for everything in the video description
where you can pick them up on Amazon as well.
Recently I helped my Brother in Law fix the network cable that runs from his
router to his PC. Apparently there were some mice that felt the cable was getting in their way
so they gave it their best effort to reduce the amount of space that cable was occupying.
This particular cable is probably at least 50 foot long and to get it installed my Brother in Law had
to crawl around under their house to get it to his PC which is on the complete opposite side
of my sister and his house. Initially he was planning to just buy a brand new network cable
and tie it to the old one and just pull it through because he wasn't too excited
about going down in the crawl space again. He called to ask my opinion and I asked him
how much slack he had on that cable? Because if there was enough of it, I knew we could
just cut it off where it was damaged, put a new connector on it and be back in business.
But I digress once again, let's show you how it's done.
You'll first want to cut your cable to the desired length.
The crimp tool I have does have a cutter on it for this but I prefer to just use my wire cutters. The
next step is to trim off about 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch of the cable sleeving and I prefer to use
my utility knife for this. There is a cutter on the crimp tool which is supposed to cut the cable
off to length on one side and then cut through the cable sleeving on the other and do this for you in
one simple step but I've found more often than not it cuts through some of the the wires too,
so to save myself from having to hassle with it I just use my utility knife.
We now have 4 different pairs of wires here. On the back of my crimp tools box
there is this wiring diagram which shows us the order that we want the wires to go
into the RJ-45 connector. I circled this one which is T568A because that was the order on a cable I
repaired a number of years ago but I believe the standard nowadays is T568B.
From what I understand it doesn't make a huge difference which one you use
you just need to make sure the order is the same on both ends of the cable. So if you're
repairing a cable you're going to want to pay close attention to how your cable is wired.
To make this as simple as possible I fan the wires out like this and then put them
into the proper order which for T568B, going from left to right is orange white, orange,
green white, blue, blue white, green and brown white, brown.
This next part is probably the trickiest part of this whole process
and that is keeping the wires in their proper order as you insert them into the connector.
You first have to press everybody nice and close together and keep them all in order.
At this point if your wires are all uneven like this you're going to want to trim them off just
a little bit and getting everyone nice and flush with one another. You can then insert the wires
into the connector with the clasp pointing up like this; of course making sure all the
wires stay in their proper order and also go all the way to the end of the connector.
All that's left to do now is insert our connector into the RJ-45 slot on the crimping tool,
crimp it down
aaaannnd uhh...
that's that.