Make and Repair Your Own Cat5 Cables

Dead Parrot said:
Usually cheaper and easier to buy premade. But there are times when you want/need a cable NOW and it sure is nice to be able to make just what you need. Especially when it is some odd length or the hole for the cable needs to be as small as possible. I do need to pickup a tester as using the active connection light on a switch is a bit primitive.
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Where are you buying your cables? When I looked last year for a 100' one it was 2x the cost of crimping my own. Easier yes, cheaper no.
 
Nice post and very informative. At my job I'm quite lucky to have inherited a large amount of self made cables. The other IT person I work with had created some of the shorter(4ft-10ft) and I had the pleasure of salvaging around a dozen 20-40ft ones from another building during a recent consolidation in a new location. The cables from the other building were made by a company we sometimes contract for odd jobs but their techs have been very kind in educating me on things they feel I can do on my own and save us large amounts of $$$.

I admit when they showed how easy it can be I was blown away. IT/Engineering has been in my family for decades so I've seen a number of testers and crimping and or stripping tools(coaxial, phone/twp, and RJ45) and it always amazes me the number of different approaches with them. Loved seeing the front loading earlier in the thread. I admit I've always had to fight an obsession in collecting them since I so rarely need to use them but its always funny to see the look on someones face when the need arises and one is produced.
 
Betaboy1983 said:
Maybe 10 minutes. Cheaper than a crimp tool though, it all depends on your situation/dire need.
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you have to be joking. unless you are scounging CAT5 from a dumpster to splice together, a crimping tool is just not that expensive, hell, you can buy a cheap ass crimper from Walmart for $5
 
Wyodiver said:
OK, very much off topic, sorry. Here's the problem: my 77 year old mom pays Mediacom for 60Mbps, yet is lucky to get 20Mbps at her computer that is 25 feet away from the Modem/router. It dips every few seconds. Mediacom says that everything is just great, as the speed is fine. I don't mind getting a kit to make some cables. But my Mom is old and to run wired would entail running wires from the router, across the living room, to her computer. I'm not willing to provide a trip hazard, and her apartment manager won't let me route it around the ceiling.

Ideas?
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so she is connected wirelessly now? Probably have an old device that can't support any better. easy check is try another device. If no device can connect faster then it is a mediacom (or modem) issue. If other devices connect just fine it is a device issue.
 
kju1 said:
Where are you buying your cables? When I looked last year for a 100' one it was 2x the cost of crimping my own. Easier yes, cheaper no.
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My longer cables were made from cable salvaged from work when we moved buildings and were told "We are abandoning this cable in place, take all you want." My shorter cables are generally picked up from sales like those sometimes posted on the [H]ot Deals section. Monoprice or Deep Surplus sales are sometimes pretty good. I usually buy a few at good sales figuring that I will use them at some point. So far having a box of pre-made cables around as a source for bulk cable has worked out better then having a full boxed roll of bulk cable.

What class cable? Found this 100ft $8.: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B...f9f-5eba-827f-f25d2e68aa42&pf_rd_i=9938477011 (Not a recommendation, just 1st thing that popped up on a quick search)
 
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It's been a while since I terminated some network cables. We used to do it out of necessity when we had lan parties cause we were too poor for premade in the times before monoprice. I've since been using premade because of convenience rather then price. However I do believe everyone should know how to make them. I also started using flat cables since you can stack 5-6 of them in the space of one standard cat-5 cable.
 
pclov3r said:
To be honest there is very little reason to make your own cables unless you need a weird custom length.

It's too easy to screw up and make a non complaint cable. You need to spend several thousand on a fluke tester to certify that the cable you made meets the specs. Doing it without that will work but you have no idea if it's compliant.

It's even far more difficult to do it for cat6 and cat6a.
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T568A vs T568B is usually the compliance problem. Otherwise you are hyperbolic. You can get data across coat hangers if the run is short enough and for long runs it depends on what you're doing. I've run over 900ft and was still able to support the PC on the other end as they were just using a terminal emulator to access our ERP. 25% packet loss is meaningless when your screen refreshes amount to 800 bytes. The switch was pretty miffed about it, though.
 
Dead Parrot said:
Usually cheaper and easier to buy premade. But there are times when you want/need a cable NOW and it sure is nice to be able to make just what you need. Especially when it is some odd length or the hole for the cable needs to be as small as possible. I do need to pickup a tester as using the active connection light on a switch is a bit primitive.
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Maybe cheaper if you are buying one cable, but if you need 5 or 10, it adds up pretty fast.
 
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Considering the "quality" of current copper, I'd like to know where you can even buy plenum cable that doesn't shatter if you breath on it! My armoured FO runs can take tighter radiuses ffs!:rage:
 
Burticus said:
I have a crappy criming tool I bought at a computer store about 20 years ago. It sucked then, it sucks now. But it works. However I have brought home so many boxes of "trash" ethernet cables that I don't think I have crimped one in many years.

At work, crimps are forbidden. Cables must be bought intact and tested, and if there is the slightest problem they go in the "trash". Cat6 is fairly cheap nowadays compared to 20 years ago... ethernet TP used to be wicked expensive.

Nowadays I deal with (and hate) more OM3 fiber than anything else.
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It's not always about cheap and pre-terminated. I pulled Cat5E through my home and had to fish walls. I don't want a huge cable end while tying to fish a wire up two stories of a home. Plus I wanted to check the cable. So much of the pre-terminated stuff is that garbage CCA cable which doesn't meet spec and can be potentially dangerous for PoE usage.
 
Ugh you guys are reminding me that I need to fish Ethernet throughout my entire house - up through multiple floors. It's the [H] thing to do. Crimping and making the cables is the easy part, it's fishing wire through finished walls that's such a major pita. sigh...
 
TordanGow said:
It's not always about cheap and pre-terminated. I pulled Cat5E through my home and had to fish walls. I don't want a huge cable end while tying to fish a wire up two stories of a home. Plus I wanted to check the cable. So much of the pre-terminated stuff is that garbage CCA cable which doesn't meet spec and can be potentially dangerous for PoE usage.
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PoE is a different beast, it's true. The more I use it, the more I just run 120; invariably something else needs to be deployed nearby.
 
Kongar said:
Ugh you guys are reminding me that I need to fish Ethernet throughout my entire house - up through multiple floors. It's the [H] thing to do. Crimping and making the cables is the easy part, it's fishing wire through finished walls that's such a major pita. sigh...
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Do it the way the my cable company did; drill out the side of the house and back in again! :rage:
 
pclov3r said:
Yes, It will work often even if it's wrong. The reason I say "Complaint" is if your cable isn't you can start dropping frames due to corruption which will lead to packet loss. There is a lot of pre-made cables that even fail this badly.
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What makes a cable non compliant?

They have set standards for a reason.
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You mean EIA/TIA-568A: or EIA/TIA-568B:

Things like crosstalk and EMI become an issue for example if you do something like untwist too much of the pairs. This is were you need the expensive fluke tester to certify the cable. Those cheap testers on eBay don't say much other than you wired the cable correctly.
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Crosstalk is causes by having the twisted pair straight going into the connector, as long as the twist go right snug against the connector RJ45 there is no issue. EMI is handled with by using STP and special RJ45 connectors for STP.

There is more concern in a punchdown then a cable hands down.

Perhaps I am looking at this too deeply or care too much about trying to do things correctly :)
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If you are talking Fiber yes, you have to go out of your way to mess up a cat 5, 5e, 6 cable. BTW the only difference between cat 5, 5e ,6 is twist per ft.
 
Kongar said:
Are you kidding me? What a bunch of toolbags! I feel for ya brother - I'd be so pissed...
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I was gobsmacked, that's for sure! The house was pre-strung with coax too but the standard of the day was to run a separate line for the cable modem. The installer actually did a good job of water-proofing but, when it's your first house and a brand new build, holy shit!
 
Todd Walter said:
Do it the way the my cable company did; drill out the side of the house and back in again! :rage:
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Yup Verizon did the same thing to me. The dude ran cat 5 from the Fios ONT into my office just attacking it with a staple gun here are there along the house baseboards. It would terrible if the cat 5 didn't sort of match the paint color, kind of like a light brown. Guess I lucked out there. I'm sure if all he had that day was yellow or blue he would have used that.... and that would have looked less great.
 
Pre-built is fine and dandy for one or two cables, but buying a cheap crimper and punchdown tool and a spool of "decent" copper is a hell of a lot cheaper than hiring someone else (who may or may not drill a hole in the side of your house) and a hell of a lot easier than trying to fish terminated wires (not nearly as ghetto looking either) when you're wiring your whole house. I do admit to buying a bunch of cheap 1' patch cables from monoprice for my rack, but that was more to do with color coding and my laziness than price.

**Edit**

I can't believe how many of you guys let installers pull shit like stapling cat5 to a baseboard. When I started service at my new house I walked with the installer and told him exactly what I was willing to tolerate: he removed all the shitty coax left by ATT (the last installer clearly had a surplus of splitters and coax remnants), ran fresh coax through the existing hole to my basement, water-proofed the hole, terminated the new line and plugged it into the modem next to my rack.
 
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Took me two hours the first time I tried. I now have so many pre-made ones laying around that I havent bothered since.I prefer pre-made anyway as I don't do trunking installs etc. Most of it is just hooking up 2-3 PCs, a switch, router and a NAS.

The customer is paying in most cases anyway so order in the ones I need.
 
TordanGow said:
It's not always about cheap and pre-terminated. I pulled Cat5E through my home and had to fish walls. I don't want a huge cable end while tying to fish a wire up two stories of a home. Plus I wanted to check the cable. So much of the pre-terminated stuff is that garbage CCA cable which doesn't meet spec and can be potentially dangerous for PoE usage.
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The worse isn't even the pre-made CCA cable. It's the speaker wire style crap. Instead of one single copper wire or copper coated aluminium, it's tons of tiny wires. Like speaker cables. If an end goes bad, you can't even cut it and put on a new connector. You have to rerun the whole line.
 
kju1 said:
Where are you buying your cables? When I looked last year for a 100' one it was 2x the cost of crimping my own. Easier yes, cheaper no.
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This is my experience as well. This talk about compliance is nonsense. Yes, I make cables wired to the right standards and you have to be careful with your crimps to ensure they are tight and done properly. Still, it's really not that hard to crimp your own and make them work. I've done cables in excess of 100ft. that worked just fine at gigabit speeds. I've added jacks in my house and all that. I've never seen packet loss or anything like that on my home network in any place I've lived in the last two decades.
 
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EODetroit said:
Been doing this for over 25 years. I originally made my own 10Base2 networks out of thinnet. Then bought some Cat5 and that spool has been with me ever since. I haven't wired my house with it, but my patch cable need has been fulfilled by that one spool ever since. Gigabit speeds are not a problem, even if it isn't Cat5e. Just don't try to make 100 meter cables, it works fine. If I ever get 10 Gig with copper (if that's even a thing), I bet it would work with short cables too.
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Yup, I still have a few spools of thinnet and boxes of connectors and terminators. Now when I do a whole house job I just buy a 1000ft spool of CAT5e or 6 at Home Depot and nobody ever wants the left overs so I have lots of extra cable. Maybe they'll make a hoarder show when I drop over. Hey -- look at that big box of 5.25 floppy drives! :oops:
 
I strongly recommend a GOOD crimp tool. In a pinch the cheapy type will work fine, but the good oens have several features that will pretty much guarantee success - they have a parallelogram arrangement so the crimp dies come straight down onto the end, not come in from an angle, and a ratchet action so a consistent pressure is applied - and you know you squeezed hard enough to fully seat the blades and cable hold down.
I've been doing this for many years, started with doing coax crimps fro thinnet Ethernet and Arcnet and moving on to UTP, I've wired two homes with phone, Ethernet, and cable, and my model railroad uses a lot of RJ12 terminated flat satin for the control system. I've used everything from cheap throwaway tools to nice ones like a couple shown in this thread, or the Klein one I have now. The more expensive tools are well worth it, even if you have the process down with the cheap ones, if you are doing a bunch of runs. My Klein has both RJ45 and RJ11/12 dies so I can use it for Ethernet cables and my model trains (I'd say phone but who uses a landline phone any more?). I have a similar crimper for coax, with the ratchet action that releases at the successful completion of a crimp cycle. If I used more solderless rings and spades on reqular wire I'd get a better crimper for that, too. A poor craftsman blames his tools, but the right tool makes the job easier for beginner and expert alike.
 
RealBeast said:
Yup, I still have a few spools of thinnet and boxes of connectors and terminators. Now when I do a whole house job I just buy a 1000ft spool of CAT5e or 6 at Home Depot and nobody ever wants the left overs so I have lots of extra cable. Maybe they'll make a hoarder show when I drop over. Hey -- look at that big box of 5.25 floppy drives! :oops:
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I've moved too many times so the only leftovers I have are various UTP types and TV coax. I do miss my desktop animals made from T connectors and terminators though. Got ruined for the couple of years I worked at a place that was a Token Ring shop, by the time I got back to Ethernet, everything was UTP. AH, the good old days.. I remember those early UTP Ethernet concentrators - Cabletron, that was it.
 
Been doing this since the late 90's. Way cheaper than buying store bought cables. Buddy of mine is an electrician. He got me a 1000 foot box of cat5 they were going to throw away at his job site.
 
leezard said:
My eyes are to bad to use a "traditional" crimper. I've made 1000s of cables with the EZ RJ45 and have never had a bad cable.
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I have made cables for years, and after finding the EZ RJ45 plug ends, i will not use any other kind
 
Brother-in-law runs the IT department for a decent sized business. He taught me how to do this...about 20 (?) years ago. I've since just bought my Cat6/5e cables in bulk, by the 1,000' roll. For the house I'm in now, I bought 4 spools. (If you're gonna pull one wire, you may as well pull 4. ;) ) I've used all those and bought 2 more spools. So, I have roughly a mile of Ethernet wiring...in my house. 4 port wall plates wherever I want 'em, a patch panel and dual 24 port Gigabit switches.

The network guy I bought all this from, when he found out it was just for my house, said, "Oh. You've got it....bad."

Once you run some good conduit, pulling more lines is easy. (Basement to attic: cross the wires over the ceiling joists and then drop 'em as needed.)
 
Kongar said:
Ugh you guys are reminding me that I need to fish Ethernet throughout my entire house - up through multiple floors. It's the [H] thing to do. Crimping and making the cables is the easy part, it's fishing wire through finished walls that's such a major pita. sigh...
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The fishing part can be a pain in the ass. I employ an old 102" (8.5-ft) CB radio whip antenna for this.
 
My boss wanted to make all of our own cables for a new building and new server room. Easy peasy, buy some spools and some pizza, run and crimp a few thousand cables after hours. Fun times.

Two days later, a couple very large boxes appears on his doorstep. "Cables are here, boss."

He started to get all flustered until I showed him the invoice: any color, custom lengths, factory molded ends, $1.32 each. "I'll still let you crimp your half of the room if you want, but I've got stuff to do."
 
If you are going to make your own cables, get a good ratcheting tool; you'll be glad you did.
 
Everyone should also pay attention to the cable type they're using. The cable in the article link is solid core copper,

Cat6 CMR, 23 AWG solid bare copper conductor
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That's intended to be used in walls and punched into jacks and patch panels. Sure, you can make a patch cable out of it and it'll be fine most of the time, but that's not really it's intended use. Solid core doesn't put up with being flexed hard or often. It also needs different RJ45 plugs. Some RJ45 plugs are intended for stranded copper, while others can also do solid core copper. If the manufacturer doesn't specify, assume it's for stranded.

For patch cables with ends crimped on them you really want stranded copper, which is designed to be flexed in the ways that patch cables are.

At the end of the day, you can just bodge together any old cable type with any old connector, but keep it the hell out of the datacenter and never, ever let your structured cable installer friends see it.
 
Still have my Klein Crimp pliers along with tester that was used for several years with Crimp Nation and a few years on the backbone network crew. Man I miss the old days at QuakeCon before Zedimax bought ID.
 
I only use 1 gauge Neodymium. Soaked in liquid helium. My electrons move faster that way.

It's a noticeable improvement.

;)
 
pclov3r said:
Actually, CAT6 cable has a plastic spine compared to CAT5 and 5e which doesn't.
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Plastic spline is not part of CAT6 spec. There are cables with and without it. The ones with it probably needed the separator to meet the 250 mhz requirement, while with better manufacturing can meet it without.
 
We used to do it at work often but not so much now.
Have more than enough network cables of different lengths in the office.
 
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