Extending cat5e

[The Natural Philosopher]

its easy.

Twist the overlapped ends together, apply hot iron and solder, slide previously placed sleeving back over joint...

The very first thing I was taught as an apprentice learning how to solder 'the Marconi Way' was that until and unless you had a mechanically sound joint, you should not apply solder..even soldering circuit boards required that component wires be bent along tracks a mm or so THEN cropped.

Temporary lab lash ups were exempt, BUT 'the wire fell off' was no excuse either.

This is exactly what SHOULD be taught to electricians at technical schools.

[Frank Erskine]

Make a joint that "doesn't need soldering" - then solder it :-)

[Tim Streater]

Ha ha, yes. Reminds me of when a colleague and I pulled 8 fibre patches through a conduit at our site in New York and then realised we'd forgotten to label them first. Ooops. Still, it was only multimode, so easy enough to shine a torch in at one end.

Yup, yup.

Is soldering taught at all?

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , The Natural Philosopher escribió:

... find you can't get the sleeve over the joint 'cos the heat travelling up the wire from the iron has caused the end of the sleeve to shrink...

[Bob Eager]

Also, those instructions were straight out of a Hynes manual. They mentioned the sleeving far too late!

[dennis]

Were they for a twisted data cable? Its easy to push the sleeve an inch or two up a mains cable, not so on a twisted cable without untwisting it.

[Dave Liquorice]

You don't untwist it. You just pry the wires apart a bit and thread the sleeve on following the twist.

[Bob Eager]

It is if it's a suitable heatshrink one.

[Dave Liquorice]

But one makes a small neat mechanical joint first.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Indeed. The simple way, though not the neatest, is two interlocking 'U's squeezed tight with small pliers.

[Andy Wade]

That certainly shouldn't be a problem with CAT5 cable. The wire insulation is FEP -- a thermosetting compound with a melting point of

260 deg. C according to Wikipedia. It's the cheaper grades of PVC that tend to suffer from shrink-back.

[dom]

Many thanks to all for the rich and varied replies - I have read them all!

To answer points that have come up a few times - I can solder beautifully (for those in the know, Lemo connectors - no problem), I have access to a professional RJ45/RJ11 crimp tool (and have put on hundreds of RJ11's without a single fault) - so my question really was "which is best for a sealed cavity?"

The one solution not open to me, is to pull new cables. Half of the rather tortuous routes are already plasterboarded and skimmed over - no chance that a new cable will pull through.

I will probably solder, as it's still quite straightforward to draw the cables out into the room for easy working.

[Camdor]

This is the proper way to do it

[Bob Eager]

[The Natural Philosopher]

No, that's the EXPENSIVE way to do it.

[Frank Erskine]

[Ian Jackson]

While there are several 'professional' ways of doing this, I still think that, for a joint hidden away in a cavity wall, the wires ought to be soldered, given a waft of WD40, heatshrink sleeves fitted, and the whole thing taped up tightly with self-amalgamating tape. Ideally, you should be able to swing on the cable.

[geoff]

naff ways of doing it also have to be explored

[geoff]

In message , Ian Jackson writes

There now follows a sub thread on how best to tie a noose ...

[John Rumm]

Not boasting, but I do have a large one: