one of the most timec consuming parts of a new build can be sleeving and it's
particularly timec consuming if your cat's constantly getting in the way
because they love they love this stuff
see very bothersome so let's have a look at some of the supplies needed some of
the decisions that I had to make uh with respect to how I want to he get
down to how I want to go about this uh right now there's sort of two main ways
to sleeve cables there's this way which is you do your heat shrink you do your
zip tie at the end and then you have the wires exposed at the end and then the
other way that uh sort of the more Enthusiast guys are going about uh this
is pretty in fashion these days is the individually sleeved wires uh which is
both a lot of work but uh both a lot of work and a lot of good looks so you just
got to decide whether you want to do that you can buy these preone extensions
but extensions have a have some ill effects such as uh you lose a little bit
of uh efficiency in the connectors and
you lose a little bit of efficiency in the longer cables so and then also okay
like the last ill effect is that now your cable is longer so you have the
original cable which looks something like this here we go the original cable
which looks something like this which is now even longer so you have to Bunch up
that extra somewhere so it becomes a little bit harder to hide so those are
sort of the pros and cons of using these they look good though they're not a lot
of work and they're not very expensive compared to doing it yourself um I
decided just because I'm lazy and I had
this particular sleeving lying around and the matching heat shrink tubing so
sleeving heat shrink tubing scissors tape marker razor blade something to
Mark the lengths for your heat shrink um ATX so this is for 24 pins here I'm just
going to see if I can get to focus so you guys can see what this tool looks
like 24 pins six pins and eight pins and
then this guy is for Mo X's female and male on the two respective sides and
freaking cats here again go away okay um
so the route I decided to go is actually slightly different I have some
challenges that I'm probably going to face here because one of them is that I
have more than 24 pins on the side of the power supply and 24 pins here so I
haven't stripped the sleeving off of it yet I don't know exactly what they're
doing but you can see that some of these have uh here like this one for example
have two pins going into one motherboard
pin so I'm going to have to figure out where exactly they're coming from because what I'm going to be doing
because I'm not quite willing to put the work in for individually sleeved but I
don't I don't like having the uh exposed
bits at the end is I'm using a slightly thicker sleeving and I am doing two
wires per cable sleeve so right now you
can see I've got got my modular here we go my modular 6+ 2
where's the two H sorry I can hardly reach with my CH chest tripod on here so
I've got my modular 6 plus2 and I've done two
wires Focus please yep so two wires per
sleeve which means that even if I bend it like this you can't see much of the
actual wire at all even if the wire color is is yellow see I bend this all
that way so you can only see about that much of it but what I'll probably do
when I'm routing the cables out of the video card itself so I'll have it going
in like this so I'll have a nice loose curve on it so that you can't really see
it uh too much um so this guide will be
more of a lazy man's way of doing it if you want the OCD way to do this um and I
mean OCD in like the kindest most respectful possible sense because it
really does get fantastic results you should check out this thread on hard
form and there we go 159 now
965 and this is by Ka master and he
basically shows you guys how to do it sort of by the book and end up with the
best possible results my way is going to be fairly straightforward compared to
that so let's get started actually one more side note before we get started
sleeving of course isn't only useful for the cables on your power supply um in
this case these are some custom fabricated things that I did uh so these
are just extension cables for one fan
power connector to dual fan power connectors and I did some sort of messy
soldering and taping and isolating or
insulating rather isolating uh insulating here and then I can take the
whole thing zip tie it heat shrink it and then it sort of hides it and makes
it not look quite as ugly so that's one thing you can use it for uh other cables
as well so I'm haven't decided how I'm going to go about this but what I'm
probably going to do is uh butcher these four adapters so I have four of these
Molex to dual SA with black cable adapters I'm going to hack them apart
and then I'm going to use these to wire up my drives on the back of the
motherboard tray when I'm done here uh just because I'm having a heck of a Time
tracking down the uh any kind of part number that I can use to fabricate these
myself so I'm just going to play the pck
It Up game uh so yeah so we're going to do the eight pin connector so this is
the motherboard connector CPU and uh go step by step here on that
one step one is to remove the existing
sleeving you can use either a razor blade or scissors for this depending on
how um how tightly how tightly packed
the wires are in there so you want to be careful if you're using a razor blade
not to accidentally cut any of the wires because remaking these cables is a heck
of a lot more work than sleeving them which is already more work than most
people are willing to put into their PCS so you just want to double check make
sure you didn't cut anything it's good this is just glue uh residue left over
from the adhesive heat shrink that was used on this cable before so uh be
careful when you're cutting up the existing uh braided sleeving because if
you cut it uh if you cross cut it then what you'll do is you'll make a real
mess like if you cut across an area that you've already cut because little tiny
bits of this plastic will get all over the place and make just just a a
horrifying mess and if you're the kind of person who cleans your own house as
opposed to has your mom doing it for you then that'll be an issue that'll be a
factor believe me I know the demographics of my YouTube channel I
know most of you are young although some of you aren't do you know that it's 96% male
who watch this channel go figure right
guys so I'm just I'll remove this other end off for this next part an optional
step would be numbering the pins before you start taking them out but uh in a
lot of cases it doesn't even really matter because as long as you follow a
schematic for whatever connector you happen to be putting back together um
then yeah it doesn't really make a difference as long as the voltages are
right so here we go actually although although bearing that in mind on the 24
pin I'm probably going to go ahead and number them especially for the ones
where there are two wires going into one connector so for some reason XFX or most
C Sonic rather has seen fit to do it that way uh so I'm going to to go ahead
and stick with their way just for peace of mind so there you go and then the
next thing we do here is we use this tool use this tool and not any other
tool don't use the one that looks like this it's round but uh has like two
prongs on the end because you're probably pretty much wasting your time
although I'm not going to do a separate guide I will show you guys how the Molex removal tool or like the peripheral
removal tool works you put this in here there's different sides for female and
male and then what you're doing is I'm going to see if I can get the camera
Focus yep there you go so you are compressing these two pins on either
side and don't eat the sleeving
cat you're compressing these two pins on either side so that what happens is once
you cover them you can pull them out of the housing right here so you just go
like that and then you pull out the wire I can't really do it cuz the sleeving is
in the way but you guys catch my drift so this one works much the same way
except that these are much more finicky um problematic connectors so you got to
make sure that when you're looking at the safety lat these are sort of side to
side the pins go in the sides this way not like sides this way cuz that's where
the little the little pins are and then
just got to get it just
right there we go make sure you're down the outside okay and then what I do is I
usually use my palm to apply some pressure to the to this in here making
sure not to apply any sideways pressure because these pins can break off so I'm
applying pressure here then I take the cable the wire I apply pressure in
towards the uh the removal tool then I
give it a little bit of a wiggle to loosen the pins make sure that they're both caught and then
pull out so there you go tools extracted
and you guys can see here now uh the little tiny pins that is very important
hold on just see if I can get that twisted for you so you can see the little tiny pins on either side that
it's important not to ruin and you never want to force it when you're doing this
guys because if you force it what can happen is you can accidentally bend the
pins completely or the little little Clips the little hooks completely
backwards and if you do that then uh you
basically have to cut this off um buy some of these pins crimp it on Fab
fabricate fabricate a completely new connector so I try not to do that it's a
real it's a real bear to deal with so there you go it takes about that long once you have some practice and and then
the next step for the next step I take whatever cables I'm going to be running
through the sleeving so I've now removed all of the ends here and then I just put
a little bit of tape on them like painters green tape is what I'm using
right now just cuz it comes off really easily so this just keeps it from
Catching when I run it through the sleeving that I'm going to be running it
through so if you have a whole group of wires that you're doing then you'll
obviously run those through if you're doing individual wires then you'll
obviously be doing these on one at a time but I'm doing two wires at a time
so you just kind of go like this until you get to the other end where I haven't
removed the connector because I don't really need to personally I find it kind
of tricky to measure these out before I put them on so I just go to the end cut
them uh you'll need oh that was one of the things I didn't mention before
you'll need a lighter or I use a little torch uh
to just keep the ends from fraying so you just give it a little little bit of
heat not a ton you don't want them to start melting too bad but just enough to
keep them from completely coming apart so now I have put the sing on and sizing
it is a little bit tricky so for the heat shrink what you want to do is you
take your your mark whatever it happens to be in my case it's a q connector and
then you line it up make a little Mark
use a pair of sharp scissors to cut right on the
mark there are ways to do this more accurately than what I'm doing but like
I said mine is the quick and dirty guide
and then you put that on there making
sure that you don't accidentally Bend back any of the strands while you're doing this cuz you'll un unbraid it and
make a mess so go ahead put that down to the end now lots of different ways to
terminate these um so what I used to usually do is I'd use a bigger heat
shrink and I'd put a zip tie under it to make sure that it wouldn't move uh but
that was usually when I was trying to fit the the sleeving really really tight
and have it be as compressed as possible
because the more here so the more tight it is the more opaque it is and the more
loose it is the more you can see through it you guys can see my finger so I was usually trying to go for that whereas
I'm using a higher quality braided sleeving this time so what I'm going to be doing is going for a more loose fit
so you guys can see my uh connector that I'm already finished so this guy right
here and at the power supply ends I'm not really as worried about how tidy it
is so I'm leaving a little bit of extra uh extra braided sleeving outside of the
heat shrink and what that means is that even if the heat shrink accidentally moves a little bit uh it won't actually
come out completely which is very very pretty much impossible to fix whereas on
the other end I've gone for the pretty
tidy approach okay so where was I here
right so you want to get it kind of almost to the end there and
then yeah I guess you can pretty much heat shink it now so I use a torch for
this it's better to use a a heat gun with like a fairly low setting but you
just kind of give it a little bit of heat try not to melt the connector or
especially try not to melt the uh the braided sleeving because that's really
really bad then you basically just wasted that piece because it'll be too
short for anything else so once that's done you go ahead make sure the
orientation of the wires within the sleeving stays correct okay and then you
come back to the other end here and what I usually do is sort of approximately
Mark I can feel where the pin ends and it's going to be a little bit under
there and then I just kind of burn through it get
the get the pins out take off my masking
tape just kind of cut that off there
like I said this totally the lazy way I'm not doing it by the book but I
showed you guys how to do it by the book as well basically follow that guide by
someone more skilled and more patient than me and uh then what I do is I let
the I loosen up the the sleeving a
little bit just because I'm not going for like
a super tight fit I just don't want it to move and then that gives me some idea
of where I stand so now I can see that I have to cut away just a tiny bit more
make sure these two wires are are the same here oh oh okay that's interesting
actually I might not need to cut away much more at all don't want it to be too tight yeah
just a little bit more so what I'll do is I'll quickly burn it and then while
it's still hot just so that I don't end up with like Globs at the end burn it
mush it just to get rid of a little bit more I don't like cutting it with the
scissors at this point because if you cut a little bit too much then what'll
happen is you will be
stuck sorry let me just cut that bit off you'll be stuck because uh you'll then
have to burn it a little bit and then once you burn it a little bit after
you've cut it a bit too much then you can end up with like you know a big um
mess of like globby bits at the end which you then have to cut off and then
all of a sudden you've gone too far and
that's problematic so I'm just kind of
trimming this back keeping on doing this being sure not to you know burn away the
uh this uh the jacket on the
wires mush mush mush okay yeah should be
good okay so now what we do is and this
is critical this is a very important step make sure you put on your other
piece of heat shrink
wrap Mark and
cut okay so I put that
on cuz if you forget to do this and you reattach the connector then you have to
take them off again and that sucks so
once youve put on your heat
shrink Chuck your cat out of the way
and then you find the connector which I seem to have misplaced you check either another
connector you check a schematic online or you label them in the first place so
here I got my two CPU connectors so it looks like black ones go at the top
which ones are these so I'm doing these to correspond pretty much directly so
I'm going to take this and I'm going to turn it around and I'm going to go okay
well then these ones go
right about here making sure the orientation of the
wires is correct before I try to put them in clip
and clip and then I make sure my heat
shrink tubing completely covers the sleeving this time make sure it's not
too loose or too tight Y and then I go
ahead and give it the old
heat really careful with the heat if you guys are using an open flame for this
part because it's very easy to accidentally melt this and then it'll start to fray and then you made a real
mess with everything so there you go I have now sleeved my two wires that is
pretty much how to do cable sleeving I don't know if I'm missing anything in
particular so thank you for checking out my little guide and I'm sorry it was