Squalor's Guide to Cable Rounding

Covering in Wire Loom: The hard work is over. Now for the fun part. It is time to cover your cable in wire loom, sometimes called split loom. Cut a section of split loom just slightly shorter than the wires to be covered. Pry the end of the loom apart and insert wires. Slide the loom close to the connector. Force your thumb atop the wires, inside the loom and push toward the loose wires. They will be forced into the loom with a minimum of additional prying, hopefully. At this point you could tape the ends and call the job done.

Paddle Wire:

I had this idea. I wanted to connect my two CD-ROM drives without having excess cable loose behind them. I wanted a custom length IDE cable but I didn't want to relocate the slave connector on the ribbon. The above picture is what I came up with and I did it with paddle wire.

After splitting the run between the master and slave connectors, I separated the run into two, twenty wire bundles. In this way the flair of wires at the end of the loom was smaller. I folded the bundle to the new shorter length but the wires protruded out of the loom. I needed something to hold the split loom closed and paddle wire was the answer.

The loom was cut to length and offset so the wire could spiral around it. It was then taped on one side while the paddle wire was tied. The loose end was tucked into the loom. Because of the short distance between the two bundles, a length of paddle wire was cut from the roll for the job. It turned out passable so I tried it with the floppy cable shown at the beginning of this tutorial.

This is a 50 pin single device SCSI cable that has been split and gathered into two, twenty five wire bundles. The first picture shows black 3/8 split loom on the bundles with a couple of notches taken out with an X-Acto knife where the cables will cross. Tying the knot to begin the wire wrap is a bit tricky. Taping the loom to the correct offset to produce the spiral is the first step. The tie is made close to the end of the loom but must not touch the cable wires. Any bitter end left from the tie can be snipped off with side cutters after the job is done or simply tucked into the end of the loom.

The second picture shows the work almost done. The paddle wire is being spiraled onto the loom from the roll. Note that the loom is longer than need be. It grows as the paddle wire is wrapped. Also, note the scissors used to cut off the remaining excess loom. They have a safety tip. They are sold to trim hostile nostril hair but for our purposes will help protect the cable.

It's finished and connected to a card and drive. Where the split loom crosses itself is tied together and recessed. The result is unusual, just what we modders want right ? I suppose you could just buy a machine made rounded cable and be 1337 enough but hand made round cables say so much more about the modder.
Alas, the age of serial ATA is almost upon us. All this rounding madness will fall by the wayside. Until then, happy modding !

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