Getting Spliced

One more task has been completed in the planned movement of the basement wall. The Cat 5 cables that were located in the ceiling box have all been relocated to the side wall and tested. This would have been a good idea even if the wall were not to be moved, since the cables from the router to the ceiling box occasionally lost contact from the movement of the floor joists, especially when the dining room had a big gathering in it. Becoming motivated to move the cables, though, was a major task.

The problem was that two of the cables would need to be completelyy re-run, and five would need to be spliced and extended to the new location. Mickey Axlebender was of the opinion that I should just install male and female connectors and extend them that way, but I was not confident that would work long-term, especially since the plan is to drywall the ceiling.

I decided to splice the cables with solder joints. Drawing inspiration from some web pages showing how the specified twists could be maintained, I began the splicing. The first cable took nearly two hours; I was deliberately going slowly to make certain my work would not create problems.

Each twisted pair was cut and spiced in a stagger pattern, the wire ends twisted and soldered, then clipped short and bent parallel with the cable.

When they were all soldered, the twist pattern for each twisted pair was maintained fairly close to the specs. Perfection was more than I could hope for, but in testing each cable as it was completed, the throughput actually seemed faster than before the splice. That may be imagination, but I think that plugging the cables in horizontally may maintain contact pressure better than plugging vertically and letting the wires hang. In other words, it seems to be working better, but I don't think my solder job had anything to do with that.

The last step was to replace the cable jacket. The jacket that had been stripped off was trimmed to length, split down the side, replaced around the wires, and secured with electrician's tape.

Another job finished that hurt more to think about starting than actually doing.