Hi all, Like many of us, my house is filled with wires. And until we get the Broadcast Energy Transmitter from the GI Joe movie working, I need the wires. But here's the thing: they're ugly. And, often, in the way.
So I am putting a call out to all Makers: What do you use for wire-wrangling? Here, as I see it, are the criteria:
1) Make-able, as in: common parts, common tools. No laser cutting necessary.
2) Neat, as in: tidy. 6 or 8 of these side-by-side (like under the table, near the router and power strip) should look better than, well... a tangle of wires.
3) Adjustable, as in: they shouldn't horribly hinder rearranging. Most of the time my speaker wire only needs to be 2' long, but sometimes I need to adjust to 4' while I move stuff around. I don't want to have to destroy my wire-wrangle in order to do minor moving (that's right, I'm talking to YOU, cable ties!!).
Right now my wires are wrangled with twist-ties, which are OK but fail terribly with criteria #2. I once had a really long ethernet cord (back in those "pre-802.11" days) stuffed into a peanut butter jar, but that doesn't work for anything with a connector much bigger than its cord.
Ideas? Thoughts? Solutions? You'd have my (and many others', I'd bet) undying gratitude, and you can come ride my zip line!
Cut the wires as short as possible. I learned that lesson trying to set up a PA system - when you're dealing with dozens of wires that are five or six times as long as they need to be, the mess seriously interferes with working.
Rip-Tie makes a product called Gecko Tape that I've used for short-duration projects like wiring up sound for an even. This stuff works very well.
I don't know how it would hold up for long-term use (like the computer cables at the back of a desk for years and years), though. I imagine a product like this would prefer to be out of direct sun, too.
This won't help with wrangling the wires, but it will help with the "straight aways" where you are running wires along the side of a room. And I know there are already products that do this.
But you can take a smaller pvc pipe and cut it long ways. Instead of cutting in half, cut it like 3/4 give or take. Then use the smaller piece to hide the wires under.
The cablebone is good for one long cord, but IMO not good for multiple cords.
Taking the cablebone concept further, and make small gear shaped objects, where in between the teeth is where the cords would go. You could make smaller ones, so they can be placed throughout the string of multiple cords.
I wish I could come up with a better way to explain it, and I can't think of a good way of drawing it.
if you can find it surplus, the stuff to have is cable duct -- the kind they use to wire offices is one kind, then there is the slotted kind. Look up cable duct at Mcmaster.com
Oh, the cablebone is just the kind of thing I was thinking of (and a great name, to boot)!
My problem is not so much long wire-runs as too-long wires -- like the power cord to the router is 4' long, but the router is only about 12" from the plug, so that's 3 extra feet of wire hanging out under the table looking like crap and getting all tangled.
And obviously I can't just cut the wire shorter. (Well, I guess I could. But I'm not gonna.)
A twist-tie from a loaf of bread works just as well, and who doesn't throw a few away every week (or have a drawer overflowing with them). Even better are the near-indestructable ones that attach most modern toys to their cardboard packaging.
I've found that rubber bands and velcro strips are great ways to organize cable cheaply.
To use rubber bands, simply wrap the cables around your hand and then slip a rubber band around the bundle. The best part is you can do this when you have everything hooked up, if you're careful.
There are also some things on my desk that I don't want to let fall behind it, like my iPod sync cable. For these, I put a strip of velcro on the back of my desk, laid the cable across it, and then "sealed" the cable down with the other half of the velcro.
Where the cablebone really works well is the long headphone audio cables. They are a royal pain in the beehind, yet there are times I need that 12 feet like when being all creative in my cube hooked up to internet radio. And there are times when I need to be keepin' it tidy, e.g. jigsaws do a number on loose cables.
So, the cablebone allows you to loop the cable up all tidy like, unloop, reloop do the hokey pokey, shake it all about etc etc. Twisties are more of a one off solution and you still have loopy knot central when you want to extend it a little. Been there? you know when you pull the twistied cable from a wall wart.
My big problem with the twist-tie/rubber-band style of wrangling is that when you've got a bunch of them next to each other, it's still a big crazy mess of wires. They're still going to catch on each other when you move the keyboard to the other side of the desk.
Not to mention the dreaded loopy knot central that radiorental mentioned above.
My computer lives on a massive old drafting table, so there's no tucking of the wires behind a desk. There is no "behind" on a drafting table, and so right now (as I sit at the *other* table with a computer on it) I look over and see a bunch of wires that, while neatly twist-tied, still look like some sort of giant electronic bird has set up roost in my office.
Some of the Mockett stuff reminds me of drywall J-channel. Comes in 1/2 inch and 5/8 inch sizes, in white. Cheap, and readily available at Home Depot and other DIY retailers. White only, no black though.
I've decided that the ultimate solution would be make-your-own retractable cords. No good for big fat monitor cords, but perfect for USB/speaker/thin cords.
Anyone have any ideas on how to construct these for already-existing cords? Like a cablebone with some sort of springy mechanism built in. I searched, but all google showed me was a link to THESE VERY FORUMS where someone asked a similar question before and didn't get any answers.
I'm not any help with making your own retractable cables. But I wanted to throw another "low tech" product out there.
Have you considered using Velcro Utility Ties? The ones I've got now are 1/2" wide and nearly 6" long. Velcro's PN is 91085 for an 8-pack, and I paid a dollar a package. They're better for the insulator on your cables than a twist tie, for sure!
I found these on a cardboard Velcro display at a local fabric store. They were way down at the bottom of the rack, below the self-stick Velcro circles and the sew-on Velcro strips.
Jsut curious-> what about the system used in hoovers? Where the cable is retracted into the hoover -and you can easily pull it out, and it blocks the cable automatically.
My hoover is way to good to open up - but perhaps someone has an old one to open up (my boyfr would cut my hair I think - if I would open it up ;-)
I've seen some cable sleeve loom that had velcro along its length to keep it closed. We could make some of that with some long velcro strips, and some spare cloth strips. Just a run through the sewing machine.
I find those wire twitst-ties are handy. they perform the same function as zip ties, but you can untie and re-tie them quite a few times before they break. I always save them when they come out of new packaging. The garden center also carries a long spool of the stuff with a cutter built into the package - if you don't mind green twisty- ties.
Rugsucker cord retractors are (comparatively) honkin' big mechanisms that can accommodate 3 conductors at the most. They would be ... impractical solutions. I use split loom and velcro wraps to rein in long cable sends on a temporary basis. If I wanna shorten a power cord by a few feet, 6 inches of 1" heat shrink does the job.