[ale] Cat-5 question

[James P. Kinney III]

On Sun, 2006-04-09 at 14:53 -0400, Sean Kilpatrick wrote:
> Boy, oh boy, do I need some help.
> Needed to string more Cat-5 cable under the house. Had to chop off
> one plug to get the wire through the holes already bored in the
> house's structure. ("She who must be consulted" has ruled that no
> more half-inch holes may be bored in walls or floors.)
> So how do I attach a new rj-45 plug to the cable?

Holding the wire in the left hand, trim the outer sheath back carefully
about 1 inch or maybe a tad more. Now rotate the cable until the orange
pair is at the "top" (wire entering the left palm from the left and
pointed toward the right) if you are using 568B (i.e. the other end of
the straight through cable has the orange pair on the outer side of the
plug and the brown pair on the opposite side.). Now pull the brown pair
to the bottom and either the green or blue toward you ad the the other
pair (green or blue) away from you.

Pinch the cable sheath between your left thumb and forefinger. Using
your right thumb and forefinger (and a moderately tight grip and
slightly pulling on the pair) untwist the brown pair to the sheath and
end with the white stripe wire on top. If needed, run the thumb/finger
tightly over the pair to make it straight. Do the same thing with the
orange pair leaving it straight at the top with the white stripe at the
very top.

Now untwist the blue pair but leave it with the blue wire on top of the
white stripe wire. This pair will go in the center.

Untwist the green pair and split it around the blue pair. The white
stripe of the green pair is at the top above the blue wire. The green
wire is at bottom below the white/blue wire and above the white/brown
wire.

Now pinch all of the wire tightly between thumbs and forefingers and
slightly flex the plane the wire "ribbon" makes and then while pulling
the plane ribbon, move the hands in a slight circle around the midpoint
(think pedaling a bicycle action with the clenched thumb/fingers holding
the wires). This will help straighten the wires and keep them from
splaying. At this point the wires should be nicely parallel.

While holding the wire flat with the right hand grip, reposition the
left hand grip to grab the flat wires as near the sheath as possible. At
this point, you should be able to left go with the right hand (to grab
the diagonal snips fro the trim) with out things becoming messy. Trim
the long ends off in one motion leaving about 5/8" of exposed, parallel
wires.

Take the RJ45 connector and hold it in your right hand with the locking
tab away from you. GENTLY place the tips of wires inside the connector
and GENTLY press the tips of the wires against the inside of the
connector top (the side toward you) and push the wire ribbon in while
keeping gentle pressure against the "roof". This pressure will keep the
wires from rearranging themselves. Once the wires are pushed all the way
into the connector they should be visible in the end past the little
connector push in tabs. Now holding the wire sheath at the back of the
connector, push the sheath HARD until it extends up under the triangular
crimp bar and shove the whole thing into the crimp tool. Push the sheath
while squeezing the crimper at first then switch to a 2 handed grip on
the crimper unless you have hands like meathooks and can break walnuts
one handed!


> 
> I have the crimper and a handful of the plugs. But I have tried
> and tried and I can not get all eight tiny wires inside the plug,
> nicely lined up in their proper grooves, and shoved all the way
> to the end -- that's the really tricky part.
> 
> I got close enough once to actually get the green light on the
> ethernet card to blink rapidly for about 10 seconds before it gave
> up.  Either there is some trick tool I don't own that makes this
> job easier, or I need the hands and eyesight of a 12-year-old
> Persian rug maker.
> 
> Are all eight wires actually used?

No. Only the green and orange pairs. But, trying to fit the wires into
the plug without all 8 is a task too hard to manually contemplate.
> 
> How do people do this who do it for a living?

After about the first 200 or so, you get pretty good at it :)
> 
> Sean
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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