Coiling Wires

Posted: Sun Jul 06, 2008 10:39 pm

For those that need it for their situations, over/under or out da door....for those who work a single venue with the same cabling/gear on a regular basis, do yourself a favor and buy a garden hose reeler on wheels. Attach all cords end to end and simply reel off what you use. The coiling is large and will not kink a cord or damage an end. You roll it center of the room and work from there.

HA! Lazy always trumps industrious!!!

Posted: Sun Jul 06, 2008 11:17 pm

It's so Jambing Razz

We open the doorway to the music and jamb it open with killer licks and beats!

Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2008 11:54 am

Davedog, awesome idea. Am I right in thinking you would use one roller for XLRs, and then coil speaker cables into a box?

Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2008 5:25 pm

Mr Monkey, you are correct. The longer and therefore larger milk cases...ie: sturdy heavy plastic with reinforcements makes a great easily carried cable box. More than one stack very properly!!!!Roll the speaks cables into it. Done and done. Bob's yer uncle. The XLR's connect end to end and roll up on the hose keeper. Easy as pie. Hose keepers with wheels then roll easily into the storage space. They stay off the floor and are movable whenever needed. When setting up, you simply pull from the center of the room... stage front. Done. Strike is opposite. AMAZING!

Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2008 5:52 pm

I ran location sound (boom mic and portable mixer setup) recently on a video production, and the video guys all laughed at my methods of rolling up cables, called me a cretin and such. I went home and figured out how to do the over-under thing they were all doing. Fortunately, I did a good enough job on the location mixing I'm getting more work with these people. Next gig, I'll be prepared to impress them with my new cable coiling skills. Seriously, though, it didn't hurt me in this situation to not know how to coil cable correctly, but this was a small local video production company. If it had been a bigger company from Atlanta or something, they probably wouldn't have offered me more work. Plus next time I won't get ragged on by the camera ops. Andy

Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2008 6:43 pm

tomato, tomahto...I like the garden reel idea.

I'll take the over on New England and the under with Miami!!!

Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2008 8:34 pm

Davedog:
Yeah, I thought so. I was sorta hoping for a magical tip on speaker cables. We actually have a couple of boxes but they're just generic storage boxes, ones you would put soft toys or collections of paper into. I actually broke one, when I was wrestling it out of the pitiful cupboard we stick things into. It was me vs. Physics and, well, Physics won.

Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2008 3:32 am

XLR hose reels are good if your leads are all much the same length. If, like me, you have a wide selection of lengths (coded at the ends) and often need, say, 10m cables before I have used all the 6m cables, a single hose reel can be annoying.

Hose reels work well for speaker cables, if the cables are fitted with Speakon connectors. You need some NL4MMX couplers to join them, but you will probably have a bunch of those for extension use anyway.

I don't now reel mains leads ever since I lent a reel to someone who used it at full load while still wound on the reel. It burnt through about a third of the way from the fixed end, and I didn't find that out until I next wanted to use it on a critical gig.

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