With the arrival of my sparkling new Asiair Plus I'd like to binge on making up some nice new (and correct length) power cables to tidy up my rig. Looking around I can find the usual stuff at Jaycar etc but none of it looks nice (as functional as it may be). The Jaycar wires all seem to be figure of 8 and remind me of speaker wires.
I thought I would ask the brains trust here to see if anyone knows where I can find some nice DC cabling and 2.1mm connectors that I can work with to solder up some sexy custom DC cables!
I went down the manual route this evening mate. I bought some flat 2 core 7.5amp DC cable and metal 2.1mm plugs from Jaycar, and then some red 3mm shock cord from Bunnings. I thought that I already had the right heat shrink at home, but it looks like another trip to Jaycar in the morning for that.
I pulled the insides out of the shock cord, and kept the sheath to make the cables look a little more premium and tried to colour match to the rest of my gear. The two cables that I tried tonight are just a tad scruffy at the ends of the nylon sheaths, but tomorrows heat shrinking will sort that out. The most expensive part was the plugs. The cables were otherwise very inexpensive. I still have more to make up tomorrow but it’s a start!
I've been down that road, too. Although for some strange reason I went with 2.5mm plugs at one end and 2.1mm plugs at the other. There was a reason behind that, but I've since forgotten what it was...
The use of shock-cord to dress them up a bit is a clever idea!
Thanks Steve. You have me wondering why you used the 2.5mm ends now lol. For anyone following this thread, I mostly finished my cable binge today, using 8mm 1:4 glue lined heat shrink from Jaycar - that’s great heat shrink btw. I ended up making a coiled USB cable out of a straight one while I was on my cable binge as well. Coiling helps avoid snags between moving parts. In this case it was the usb cable that goes from the mount to the Asiair. I tried to find coiled usb cables locally and ended up giving up. DIY was a LOT cheaper anyway. Whilst on my coil binge, I also made up a coiled mount power cable for the same reason using a coiled power cable from Supercheap Auto. Still tidying up but getting closer to neatness now.
A note for anyone who intends to make up cables using my recipe - it might be better to find 4-5mm shock cord rather than the 3mm that I used. The 3mm was really high quality and a nice snug fit, but took a lot of effort to get onto the cables. I did try the bunnings 4mm guy rope shock cable but it was absolute rubbish and I went back to the 3mm and just persevered.
Google “braided expandable cable sleeve” - even cheaper than buying shock cord and pulling out the core.
The braided poly sleeve is even easier to use as well. I use that for bundling cables. The shock cord outer has a more premium look / feel to it like a good audio cable, but you can't beat the ease of use of those braided poly sleeves.
