Knowing how to make your own networking cable is an important, handy skill for a few reasons. First, network cables that you buy at the store are generally grossly overpriced: a 7-foot-long cable can run. Secondly, it's hard to find a ready-made cable that's just the perfect length; most of the time it's either too long or too short. When you make your own, the cable will be exactly the length you want, and if it's not, well, you can make another one or adjust it.
You can also make other hardware parts for the network, including network wall ports and patch panels. As you will see after reading this post, this is a skill that's not only easy to learn, but it doesn't cost much, either.
The biggest return on this investment, however, is that you may find making and wiring your own network hardware actually fun, and it gives you complete control of your home network. A well-designed wired home network is also the best in terms of performance, since, for right now cabling is much faster and more reliable than a Wi-Fi signal. If you want to do serious streaming and data sharing within the local network, running network cables is the way to go.
Now, let's start with the cable itself.
1. Making your own network cable
A network cable basically consists of a patch cable and two network connectors (formally known as RJ45 modular plugs) attached to each of its ends. The job of making your own cable is attaching these connectors to a patch cable.
Here are the steps to make own network cable. The wiring scheme is the hardest part
The steps:
a. Use the tool to strip the patch cable's jacket about 1.5 inch from one end; you'll find eight color-coded wires (twisted into four pairs) that you'll need to arrange in a particular scheme. (In my experience, it's easier to spread these wires out and put them in the right scheme when you strip more than 1.5 inches of jacket. Later on you can cut the wires shorter if need be.)
b. Despite the small sizes of the parts involved, the plug has pin grooves on the inside to accommodate the wires, and the tiny size means that the wires can't easily go to wrong pins as long as they are properly aligned coming in. Check to make sure the wires go into the plug in the right order.
c. Insert the plug (with the wires now inside) into the crimp slot of the tool and crimp it.
Repeat the same step with another plug on the other end of the patch cable, and you have made yourself a network CAT5e cable.
2. Wiring a wall network port
As you might imagine, it's not a good idea to run a long cable from the router (in the living room) all the way to a home office, with, say, the kitchen in between.
Instead, it's better to make two wall network ports, one at the router and the other in the office.
In this post, though, I'm just talking about how you can make an Ethernet jack, with the ends of the patch cable already sticking out of the wall.
Depending on your home, the actual job of running patch cables behind the wall or under the house, and making both of its ends come out of the wall, can be tricky.
A good punch-down tool is essential to making your own network port.
The steps:a. You can strip more than 2 inches if needed, since the extra length will be cut off, but note that there's a limited amount of patch cable coming out of the wall so you don't want to cut it too short.
b.Place the cable in the middle of the jack and push its wires on the pins of the matching color for the 568B standard. This means that the orange wire goes into the orange pin, the blue wire goes into the blue pin, and so on..
c. Use the punch-down tool to punch these wires down on their pin in one quick motion. If you do it right, the wire will be punched down, and the excessive wires will be cut off.
Wiring an Ethernet jack is actually much easier than making a network
connector, since you don't have to remember the wiring scheme; instead
just match the colors of the wiring and the pins
If you want to have a wired network with many wall network ports coming out in different rooms of the house, it's best to use a patch panel at the central location where the router/switch and/or the home server is. A network patch panel is basically a collection of many wall ports on one panel, with each of the ports connected via a patch cable to another port elsewhere in the house. This allows for easy management of the wired network and better organization.
Wiring a patch panel is very similar to wiring a network wall port.
In a way, the patch panel is just a bunch of network jacks bundled into one. You can find a patch panel with anywhere from 8 ports to 24 ports or even more, and you can also use multiple patch panels together to make a bigger one. Generally, you want to have a patch panel that offers the same number of ports as the total number used in the entire home or office.
Wiring a patch panel is exactly the same as wiring an Ethernet jack; you just need to do that multiple times for multiple ports.
Note that a patch panel is more of a convenience than a necessity. You can always just turn patch cables coming to the central place into network connectors (mentioned in the first part of this post) and connect them directly into a switch or router.
That's it for now; if you have questions, put them in the comment section below or send it us way via e-mail or at us Facebook page.
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