Crafting a Cat5e Cable

Scott H. Bowers

Materials

• Raw Cat5e cable ~50 feet.

• Wire Cutter/Cable Stripper

• RJ-45 Crimper

• Ethernet tester

• RJ-45 terminators (not shown)

Cutting and Stripping

• First I cut the end of the cable at a point that I saw fit to begin measurement.

• Then I perforated and stripped the PVC Jacket from the Copper twisted-pairs beneath.

Carefully!

• With the tools I had available, I had to be careful while perforating the PVC because it was possible for this tool to also cut through some of the copper strands.

Strands and Ordering

• To make a Straight Through cable I separated the pairs and readied them to be inserted into the RJ-45 terminator.

• The pattern is as follows:Orange-white, Orange, Green-white, Blue, Blue-white, Green, Brown-white, Brown.

RJ-45 Crimping.

• Once organized, the array of copper strands had to be channeled into the 8 slots available in the RJ-45 terminator.

• After being shoved into the channels the crimper is used to force the RJ-45 pins through the light PVC jacket and into contact with the copper strands.

Wire Testing

My wire test kit did a strand-by-strand check for signal across each pair and offered me a varying noise-level for the quality of each strand’s throughput.

Both cables I made (2 ft. and 4ft.) passed on their first iteration, I will chalk this up to practice and luck but definitely not skill.

The Final Product

• Now I am left with two working Cat5e cables, and enough raw cable and RJ-45 terminators to make three more custom length Ethernet cables.

• The usefulness of this skill always has, and always will surprise me with it’s rare need, yet perfect utility.