Cable tidying guide

Froggy, I'm going to nominate you as poster child for "why cable management is a good idea" - that is one frightening mess you've got!

Great article, too.

(You guys in the UK really get screwed on prices for some things, don't you? 1 UKP != 1 USD...)

 

Froggy...DUDE...seriously. What a mess!

@bburger,

You maybe aren't aware of this yet, but take a look at a lot of past posts and you'll see what I mean. One pound==one dollar over there, and very often. They have import duties that seem to raise the price of things quite considerably...it's unfortunate, but true. The British get horribly discriminated against price-wise.

 

OK, so the official conversion rate is USD$1.80 to GBP£1.00 but because of economies of scale (the US is like 5 times the population of Britain), shipping costs, local taxes (VAT is 17.5% on everything) etc it means that often when you ignore the currency, the numbers are very similar. Hence $1 = £1.

Overall, Britain is a very expensive country to live in, and most of the US is relatively cheap. So if you're talking about a sheet of plywood from Home Depot, that might cost 5 bucks but be more like 5 quid in England.

 

hmm well its a decent start to an article but its not really a worth while article if there isnt any before and after shots, or at the very least real life examples inside a case


oh and that comments about velcro in network rooms... I had to replace several swicthes in one day.... total time was like 14 hours of nonstop unvelcroing, unplugging, replugging, and revelcroing ( not even gonna talk about the fun of replacing the actual 100 lbs+ behemoths)

 

I recently startedworking on a "new" method of sleeving cables: I bought a long narrow spring from the hardware store and have been experimenting with that. It is will probably be as much of a pain as braided sleeving to install, but the shiny coiled steel sure does look pretty. I've found that you can run a piece of metal coat hanger wire down the center to keep the spring from continually trying to straighten itself out. This also lets you bend the whole thing into nice shapes and it will stay that way. I'm still working on a way to make the ends look nice though. I woudn't put so much effort into it (it really is a pain to work with), except that it would look absolutely BEAUTIFUL in a chrome-themed case. Similar to the shower hose in Orac 3.

 

What about cableguthers (dont know the exact word, dutch word: "kabelgoot")



in the bottom of the case the white thingy, i love this kind of cable tidying, its a hard plastic tube with a lit to close it.

(sry for the bad english, but english terms isnt my best thing)

 

Unless I missed it, you failed to mention that spiral wrap doesnt bend very easily (or if you do, it all splits up)

Also didnt really highlight the fact braiding is very flexible.

Fans - braided
PSU - not braided, but some parts are braided (bought that way.. Tagan )
Spirial wrap - just because I couldnt be arsed to braid

My PC:

 

Spiral wrap is incredibly flexible, and the whole point is that it splits up - just depends how you use it.
I also think you could see from the pictures and use your own judgement about them.

 

This willl sound fairly daft but have you ever thought about using one of those extendable dog leads? Tie the lead to the point that the cable for the headphone is usually folded up to then when you move away the lead can move freely but if you let it go it returns back to where it normally is when you're at your desk etc?

 

I'll have to get hold of a cheap dog lead/retractable key chain and try some stuff. I reckon if I were to actually take the chain out and replace it by the headphone lead, *doubled back and starting from its midpoint* it might be able to unroll symmetrically. But no idea if that will work in practice...

 

The article is ok. But I think it would have been better to show some of the magnificent braiding jobs we have seen in these forums.

 

Or, better:



The clothes line is cheap and so badly-made I pulled it apart with my hands and the tacks holding it together popped off. Then I cut off most of the clothes line, leaving about 25cm left, tied that to the middle of my headphone cord (with a reef knot - had to Google for that with one hand while holding the wound-up thing with the other). I think I went a bit mad on the pre-winding, though, as the thing almost tries to climb up its own cord. I'll have to re-do it later. Note I had to re-attach the metal thingy that used to be on the end of the line to the headphone jack so it doesn't disappear in.

 

Ebuyer (UK and probably US) do cheap sleeving kits, under a tenner iirc. You get all the braid, heatshrink, some zip ties and a molex/ATX connector removal tools too.
Bargainous!

 

Hey guys
You missed another method in your article. A cheap one too.

Grab some ELECTRICAL TAPE and start at one end of the cable and wrap it round until you reach the end like the molex plug, and then cut it and start again til you have done it all. Personally I prefer black electrical tape when I do this method.
Once done cables can easily be bunched together and routed to where you want them to go, and with black cable ties (or as some ppl call em -ZIP TIES), they can be finally held together and cable tied out of the way. If your case is dark, you virtually don't see the cables.

 

Ikea also do boxes that come with cable ties, velcro straps, etc for £1.99.

 

Nice guide!

Two things you missed though: Cable folding and masking tape! Ok, it looks pants, but if you don't have a case window, and are just worried about airflow, that's fine:



Also, see that green cable tie in the second pic? That's a useful trick for making stubborn bundles of cables stay in their right place: bend them into the right shape, then put on a cable tie really tight.


ch424

 

Actually, I think the UK is in the top 5 for cost of living - not far from countries like Switzerland or Japan.
There's a very interesting article in the current PCPro (Sept 05 issue), that says while there are things like economies of scale that inflate the price compared to the US market, they don't come close to accounting for the almost doubling in price. The least understandable is the cost of downloadable software, where there aren't things like manufacturing costs - but companies still charge different prices in different countries. Another example is the price that Apple charges per download on iTunes - they've not come up with a sensible reason why we should be charged more than the rest of Europe...

I'll get off my soapbox now