Cable connectors for telephone wiring

[Sneezy]

I'm in a house that originally had telephone services supplied by NTL but now has them supplied by BT. There are NTL sockets in the living room and bedroom which connect to the incoming cable in a brown box in the cellar. My plan is to connect the new BT master socket (living room) to the old NTL socket (living room) and in turn connect that socket to the NTL socket in the bedroom - in a daisy chain. Not difficult to do since most of the wiring already exists BUT I need to join cable together without using a junction box (there's no place for the box to go - the wiring has to be inside the brown box). The existing wiring is joined using little IDC plastic connectors, similiar to those used when joining electrical wiring. Trouble is, I can't find these connectors or anything similiar anywhere. Suggestions please.

[Harry Bloomfield]

A method I find useful, is to solder them. Find some sleeving which is a good fit on the wire, push a short bit onto each of the wires, strip a few mm. Lay the two wires to be joined along side each other axially and solder, then just slide the sleeving over the joint. Finally serve the joined wires over the top, with some tape.

[PoP]

Before you do this make sure that you disconnect the wires which head off to NTL. Just because those wires might not be connected at the local junction box in the road doesn't mean that they might not become connected at some indiscriminate point in the future - even NTL engineers make mistakes!

I've done the opposite here - the place was wired for BT with extensions in the bedroom and study. I changed to NTL, and in order to use the BT extensions I had to cut off the links to the BT world.

PoP

Sending email to my published email address isn't guaranteed to reach me.

[Peter Parry]

Commonly known as Jellybeans (Cable Connector 8A). E-mail me your address and I'll send you a few.

[John Rumm]

I asked this question a while ago and managed to track down the beasties in the end with help from various folk round here!

They are a type of skotchlok connector. Pop over to

and type 239-3988 into the search box.

Ignore the silly price that RS want for the crimp tool - an ordinary pair of pliers will work fine (in fact you can even crimp them by hand I found!)

Failing that, for a "one off" joint, then as Harry said, solder and a bit of heatshrink will do the trick nicely.

If you need to make a waterproof joint on something like phone cable I found the following technique works well:-

You will need two sizes of heatshrink - a small one for the individual wire joints, and a larger one that will cover the whole cable. You also need a hot melt glue stick. Solder and sleeve the inner wires as normal (remember to slide the overall sleeve over the cable first as well!) Take your glue stick and shave some fine slivers off it with a sharp knife - insert these into outer heatshrink as you position it over the join. Now when you heat the sleeve the glue melts and encapsulates the joint while at the same time bonding the sleeving to the joint making it all waterproof.

(Failing that, buy some of the ready made heat shrink that already contains the hot melt glue!)

[Harry Bloomfield]

For waterproof joints, I tend to use Self Amalgamating Tape (3M). For those who have not come across this stuff, it is like a roll of rubbery material, with plastic in the roll to stop it sticking together. The idea is to pull it to stretch it, as you wind it around your joint, to about twice its original length. This causes it to amalgamate into a solid rubber like 'blob' which is completely waterproof and sticks tightly to almost anything.

It is not UV proof, so it therefore requires a final covering of ordinary tape.

[Dana Gale]

A little like the contents of your skull, eh?

I do realize you've been set up, Harry, by people with agendas deeper than yours, but you should've considered this before you got involved.

Fuck off.

[N. Medina]

Harry suggest joining wires by soldering them.

How utterly fascinating.

Go ahead, eat them. They'll do you good.

Fuck off, Harry.

[Huge]

Is your life really so empty that you have to keep this up?

[John Rumm]

I have always found the SA tape I use (CPC I think) is OK with UV exposure... bit fiddly on fine wires though...

[Reverend Parson Peter Parsnip]

The Lord alerted my mind to the presence of this EVIL article by Harry Bloomfield, and I thusly replied:

Please, no more sick extended metaphor euphemisms.

[Elinor G. Snow]

Is your life really so empty that you have to poke your nose in?

[Phil Kyle]

Oh, the depravity!

[Phil Kyle]

Although cannabis has been lowered to Class C it's still illegal, Harry.

[Phil Kyle]

Harry has filled the hole. So to speak.

[Huge]

Hey, f*****ad, this is a public place. I don't have a great deal of choice but to read your droolings, since you mung the headers to avoid killfiling, the sure sign of anencephaly.

Now f*ck off and die.

[Reverend Parson Peter Parsnip]

The Lord alerted my mind to the presence of this EVIL article by Phil Kyle, and I thusly replied:

So why is he hiding in uk.d-i-y ?

I'm beginning to smell a rat, especially amongst all the "new" faces we've seen in URC lately. Could Harry be amongst them, no longer brave enough to post under his own name after being the cause of such carnage?

[Sneezy]

PoP wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Yeah. Interesting wiring on NTL's part. The brown box in the cellar feeds the junction box in the bedroom using 6 core wiring. All 6 wires are connected in the bedroom but only four in the cellar. I've ended up drawing a diagram so I can get my head around what to snip, what to connect, and what to leave alone. First thing I did was disconnect NTL. It's interesting that they don't have a master socket that delimits where the supplier's responsibility ends and the customer's begins - like BT do.

[Sneezy]

John Rumm wrote in news:ap4Vb.788$ [e-mail]:

Oh dead chuffed. It's too dark to see in the cellar but looking at the picture I think I can now see how the little things work. You shove the wires in and press it shut. Not IDC at all.

[Sneezy]

[e-mail] (Lurch) wrote in news: [e-mail]:

But no tool needed though. From what I can gather, IDC is a term for a class of connector rather than, as I originally thought, a connector in itself.