Cutting, Stripping, And Sorting The Wires
Cut a piece of Cat 5 as long as you need. When you cut, remember the old saying: Measure twice, cut once. Make sure the cut on each end is clean and straight.
Strip about an inch of the insulation off the cable. Cut it back nice and square. Some crimping tools such as the one used in this article come with a built-in wire stripper. You put the cable in to a stop on one side of the cutter. It will cut the jacket the right length to make a perfect crimp. It is extremely important that you only cut the plastic insulation/jacket and not the wire. Damaging one of the 8 wires, even if you just nick it or partially cut it, will ruin your cable.
Untwist the wires. You'll notice that there are 4 pairs of multi-colored wires inside. Sort the pairs by color. You should end up with wires color coded as follows: blue/blue-white, orange/orange-white, green/green-white, brown/brown-white.
Note: Some Cat 5 cable skimps on the color-coding and you will have to keep the track of which wire was wrapped around which. If at all possible, check the cable before you buy and make sure the color-coding is easy to recognize. If not, you'll be cursing up a storm later and wish you would have spent the extra 5 bucks on the better cable.
Now align the wires in the following order from left to right. The order is important since there is a wiring standard defined by the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) http://www.tiaonline.org. It's called the EIA/TIA-568 Commercial Building Telecommunications Wiring Standard, and you can find more information on it here: http://www.digital-delivery.com/Standards.htm#s5
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W H I T E
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Get the wires lined up and nice and straight. Then clip off the top millimeter so that they are all the same length and stick out about half an inch from the insulated part.
Page 1: Making your own
network cable
Page 2: What type of cable do you want to
make? (this page)
Page 3: Attaching the plug / RJ45
connector
Page 4: Making a crossover cable
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