you just finished building your new gaming rig and it looks awesome but
there's one big problem the cables are
boring sure keyboards come with generic sleeved
cables these days and the majority of power supplies have moved on from
ketchup and mustard to black but where's the personality in that how do you set
your build apart from the rest of it there well don't worry custom sleeve
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this is one hell of a first real problem but right now i'm stuck using this super
long cable to plug my phone into my car and it looks awful
not only is it plain but the xs gets tangled up and i can't really close the
chummy and uh it's just gross so let's fix that
typically if you only need a single cable you're probably better off
ordering something from a custom site but if you like diy and like to have it
your own way or are building an entire set then building your own cables is a
great way to go if i'm honest i've never
done this before the script says it's easy enough you just add some paracord
and some solder points right yeah technically so
are we just doing it yeah oh sick for making a usb cable it's you know your
standard electrical tool soldering iron carbon filter wire strippers and cutters
a heat gun and some wood or metal dowel we'll explain those last two later we've
also got a pair of helping hands to help keep things in place as well as well the
script says standard lighter hours didn't have fuel so this is what
we've got for materials we've got some usb 2.0 cable
paracord sleeving USB-C connectors and
their housings usb a connectors and also their housings so you always need this
stuff over here but for personalization you can go for just about any color of
paracord heat shrink and tech flex this nifty purple one right here is what i
chose because i like it but the options really are
pretty much endless we've got a few examples here today but there are dozens
if not hundreds of different patterns available online we'll decide on the
heat shrink color and whether or not i want to add any tech flex later on there
are a few things to know when ordering your supplies primarily the size of
everything you can find thinner usb cable which makes for an easier time
sleeving but you have to make sure that you have the right size and shrink ratio
for your shrink wrap or it just won't stay on and if you're making a usbc to
usbc cable like i wanted to try and make today you have to make sure you've got
at least one end with the 5.1 k ohm resistor on the cc1 and cc2 ports this
helps the host device make sense of the incoming signal when using usbc
connectors with usb 2 cables so yeah i guess our c2c connectors didn't arrive
in time i'll kind of show you exactly why we can't do it here so this is the
size of the pads we're dealing with and uh the resistor that we have is
well it's pretty much bigger than the connector so i think you can see why that would work so yeah because of all
that we'll be doing a classic USB-C to type a configuration today by the way if
you guys love diy stuff make sure you're subscribed because Linus is diying his
whole new house right now it's gonna be suck well i guess if we're doing type a it
doesn't solve my car problem so i kind of want to just have a long one sure how
expensive is this stuff not very not very this roll was probably
20 bucks for 50 feet or something like that okay that's not bad okay so now
that i have this i need equal length paracord is that what i'm seeing correct
all right so we just pull these strands out
and that's how we're able to put our cable in i guess so i'm having a bit of
trouble getting it in i have just the tip do i just keep on going like this or is
there an easier way to do it so you want to fix the fray so this is where the blowtorch comes in normally we use a
lighter okay yeah so you want to set that bad boy fire but melt it oh my god
it might have melted it a little too closed nope
oh
okay let's don't breathe that in i feel like
i made it worse yeah i feel like you did too
yeah this definitely seems like a lighter job instead of a mouse yeah that's kind of why i was hoping for a
lighter map gas wasn't working great we're going to try just a touch of ca
oh yeah there we go so this seems very doable for like one cable but if you
wanted to do like a 24 pin how long would this take luckily with 24 pin it's
thinner so the 18 gauge wire that we'll be working with when we do the PCIe
connector later it's not as hard this is a thicker cable so it takes a lot more
effort to actually get everything all the way through so there's a usbc
okay here's the usb a all right this is a lot easier to solder
because you just have to do these four channels here whereas this one you need to do those four little points these are
helping hands you don't need them but they make your life a lot easier so we
do have some flux core solder so you don't need it
but if you want for your solder joints to look good
i would recommend putting a little bit on there so what the flux is doing is
just preventing air from getting in and making your like solder joints all gross
and corroded like yeah so pluth just brought this up and i had the same
concern when i was soldering these the heat shrink that was on them moved back
and if they touch your device is dead
so are we doing anything to fix that
well we could glue the whole thing oh
i'm done for that yeah so i actually do this all the time and it's a good idea
from ploof to do it here when you have just something that you soldered you
don't want to have the connection take all the strains so if you just
dab a bunch of hot glue on there it's good so yeah it doesn't matter which
cable goes to which one you just have to make sure that on both sides you do the
same one so we're going black red green white and we could do
any permutation of those doesn't matter just make sure it's the same on both
sides or okay so basically
touch these two together it makes a beep continuity tester
easy i have no clue which pins do which thing but
yeah so ground is the whole housing
to this pin yep
and then how
all right yeah we're just plugging it in i need much finer tips to get in there
this seems like a fire hazard so then you hold that part
all right and we should just be able to plug your phone or your keyboard or
whatever in that's okay i've done it before as long as those wires don't
touch hey look at that charging it works so normally what you can do at
this point too is you can like plug it into a laptop or something or your computer to make sure data transfer
works as well but i think we're good um i'm not concerned about that alex has
got all his wires going the only concern i have right now is the exposed wires
there so we're going to glue everything together before we heat shrink and put all the housing on
oh that'll do so yeah i'm quite happy with my little
cable here Colton we don't sell cables like this on
lttstore.com but we do sell cable ties
and water bottles actually you should get a water bottle so okay so what we forgot to do is we forgot to show you
how to tech flex stuff and we also forgot to show you how to coil stuff if
you want to coil so what this is for is
it's mostly aesthetic but it also makes the cable a little thicker oh so the
tech flex is just like protection for your paracord yeah it's like a
protection and some people like the kind of like sheen that it gives like i've
got a few different kinds this one's just black i think but then there's also
a clear guy here and then this is shimmer or maybe this is the black and
this is the shimmer yeah this is the shimmer oh yeah sleeving yeah right
too bad you know you don't want this on there right no okay good
you basically just hold it with one thumb and then start wrapping it around
like that okay easy yeah cool
now we just give her with the heat gun yeah one thing to note before you start
be careful if you put too much heat you can
like damage the cable first of all but you can also just damage the exterior of
the paracord or if you're using techflex it melts a lot easier than this stuff
does and so you want to always use the lowest heat on your heat gun when doing
this because it's really easy on high heat to just like basically destroy your
cable or make it look really bad by giving this big dark black spot on it
okay so i was about to give her at 950 degrees i would not do that don't do
that i would not do that also this is an aluminum rod it's going to get really
hot really fast so at this point normally what you do is
you would keep this like it is and then you would let it sit for a few hours uh
ideally even overnight and then you can remove the tape and the coil should
basically retain its um form okay cool
yeah so we've got a few coils already made and so nice once you're done
you end up with something kind of like this yeah it doesn't spring it just adds
a little character to your cable some people like to like have the cable come
out like an inch and then have a coil go across most of the keyboard and then the
cable comes out yeah it looks pretty but that's about it
i dig it yeah so now that alex has finished making his
nice usb cable Anthony is going to try his hand at making a PCIe connector an
extension for your power supply have you done this before Anthony no
perfect i haven't either unlike the usb cables which i've made plenty of i
haven't done any extensions for cables i've been meaning to get into it and so
this is a good opportunity for both of us to learn all right so we've got 18
gauge wire which should handle you know most graphics cards pretty comfortably
these are okay male and female connectors pretty
nice just have them
yeah we've got these terminals these are the actual
ends these are basically what actually plugs into your graphics card it's not
this that plugs in it's this and this is connected directly to the wire inside
this thankfully we've got some uh crimpy boys here
so satisfying
i've done Ethernet runs before lots of Ethernet runs
and uh let me tell you those the crimpers that don't have this ratcheting
mechanism do not buy them they need the
ratchet so i can't help but noticing that our wire is all black and that's
going to be difficult to distinguish between the different wires but the
great thing about extensions is that as long as your pins are all lined up properly you don't have to worry about
the pin out diagram for each power supply that just goes straight through they're already
set up properly so you're just extending them the bad thing
about extensions though is that they obviously take up more room in your case
because there is more actual cable so
chances are low we're going to fry something right but for this we don't need to solder anything so for some of
you this is probably going to be easier we're going for more of an LTT orange
for our paracord this time around so yeah it should look a little bit better
on the inside of your case if uh my estimation is correct i like orange
so along with the uh crimpy boys here
we have wire cutters or side cutters actually
this here pin extraction tool if we make a mistake with uh sliding those pins
into these here connectors we also have
where's the wire yeah there it is wire strippers
and most importantly we have
a lighter and the reason for that is heat shrink which i'm sure we've
already gone over right yeah so yeah to start we'll measure out our cable and
sleeving for each terminal we're just doing an eight pin connector so we need
eight wires always make sure to buy extra materials just in case you need
them we could easily screw up a wire a terminal or even one of our connectors
so we bought extras we each like
also make sure to give yourself some slack for cable management so
measure the general path you think you'll be taking along the back of your case and then maybe add an inch on top
of that we're going to just push ours straight against our measuring tool like
so and give it a snip with the side cutters at the desired length
then you do the same for your sleeving material alright there's eight
mostly equal lengths so the next step is stripping the cables and attaching our
terminals you want to expose about three millimeters on each end so measure and
strip if you want to be extra careful you can mark with a knife or something
sharp while you've got your ruler out when you're choosing a
wire stripper make sure that the little detents in here that line up to
different wire sizes actually match up with your wire in this
case we've got from 32 gauge up to 20
gauge but we need 18 gauge this is just gonna like destroy some of the cable
these are pretty awesome um they don't always work depending on your
cable i know i've tried mine with speaker wire and the shielding on that
is just way too thick but on something like this if you just feed in a couple
of millimeters and you give it a little
check that out oh that's awesome yeah it's super nice
guess what they connect oh my god
unlimited power
so wait we're just gonna have a single piece of paracord with all of these in it uh no
so you'll be sleeving each individual wire okay so that you have individual strands
on your extension okay so yeah push that through
strip it off well you might want to measure and then cut to length
screw measuring okay so how much of the paracord should
be covering this it shouldn't be covering the
terminal it should be covering up until basically where the terminal meets the
wire okay so right about there yeah so
if i measure with another terminal
then that should theoretically and then if the ends are frayed we've got a lighter on
hand so you can melt them up but that looks that looks okay
well one endless all right the other end looks uh well i
mean it looks kind of like the black that you'd normally get on the end of these let's see if it goes in
nice it clicked in all right let's try the other end
yeah now from here we need to make sure that we get into the correct orientation
so actually probably what we could do get them together like
that oh damn
all right that's our extension we're done we're done
one down seven to go oh god
as it turns out what we were doing before we we assumed that uh female would go to
female and we didn't really think to question that
and like male would go to male but you know on second thought i'm like is
there normally like a like a little thing sticking out of the mail end of a
pci express connector and like
i guess it makes sense because it's got to go so far into this one right nothing
really clicked so when i said that i didn't i've never done this before i
haven't done this before and we managed to get this mail and in
specifically because i managed to mash that so badly with crimping so crimp it
once only on the four wings so
it should look very much like
that flat on the back
chunky in the front i got there in the end
but we had tainan come in and you know kind of redo everything because i have
other things to do today tldr this which
this plugs into is in fact male
so it's like a seahorse i guess i don't know
anyway it's reversed from what you'd think it is also um
for those of you playing along at home we discovered that
if this little groove on the top of the male end here specifically
the female doesn't have quite that same
key if that is pinched in any way you're going to have a bad time it's not going
to lock into place you might it might actually like
straight up not go in so yeah
just pinch here
it's beautiful Anthony
so your first one might look like this
actually you know what if we had multiple different colors we could just have this be a rainbow you could you
could mismatch the lengths by on purpose
in order to make yourself a nice aesthetic i mean this just looks like i
don't know a giant cheeto are you ready to test it Anthony am i ready to test it
hell yeah oh man um you know what would be a good way to
test it if we have a multimeter yay
one
two three
four
one more come on
we've got an old i think it's a 680. okay
good luck everybody
oh i got a flashing cursor uh oh
now blank screen do we not like it no it works
yes but there's no keyboard detected oh what
a mess i'm not happy with it i wish i could go back and redo it but this is what we're
living with now these connectors are very finicky they're they're simple
enough to understand they're simple enough to use but if you
don't have a little bit of practice getting them just right you're gonna end
up wasting a lot of wire and other
materials thankfully those materials are not very expensive and if you can get
them for you know relatively cheap in bulk uh and presumably from the same
supplier so you don't have to pay multiple shipping costs but it's fun and
gratifying to sit down and actually make these cables look the way they do and
you can make them look however you want and uh i think that's great you know
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do you make your own cables at home or have you been thinking of getting into it let us know in the comments below and
make sure to check out our video on building a mechanical keyboard that was
a lot of fun too