I've just been re-wiring my studio to accommodate a new desk, patchbays and outboard. My figures are sore with stripping & twisting balanced cable and I'm totally [email protected]#ked off with soldering... Sorry just needed to vent some anger! We've all been through it!

Ah, I feel better now. must keep thinking " It's all for the greater good, It's all for the greater good"

Steve

I just finished building 8 channels of Seventh Circle A12's now I have to rewire and solder everything this week grr!

I feel your pain.

V

I hope you're not stripping wire the stone-age way, where you have to hold the wire in one hand and pull with the other.

I love soldering. It's like therapy.

Yep its all being done the hard way! I don't like the thought of buying crap insert cables. You spend a fortune on great gear only to send the whole mix in and out through bell wire! 100m drum of VDC cable and sore fingures is the only way!

Thank you all for sharing your pain. together we are stronger to indure lol!!!

I'm just about finished up with my nightmare , 300 connectors . Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

But you need to invest in a wire stripper that does the holding and the pulling at the same time. Big hand saver.

i have one and love it!
absolutely the way to go.

LOL!

I could not agree more. Every time I buy a relevant tool for a job, it depresses me to think about how many times I did it the hard way, when I could've just bought a $10 wire stripper.

Could you give some examples?

The ones I'm familiar with require too long of a piece of
wire to work with.

I have been soldering 9-5 and mixing nights- it makes it REALLY fun to push faders with 850-degree burn blisters on your fingetips, doesn't it?

Sharing your pain, bro-

JvB

the biggest bitch for me is keeping the connectors and the cable in contact in just the perfect way so i can solder them together. those freakin' helping hands don't work for crap!

iron in one hand, solder in the other... am i missing something?


gregoire
del ubik

i often end up with solder being held with my teeth and then breathing smoke till i can't see and am choking.

I too have made myself VERY sick from breathing solder fumes on extended soldering sessions. I finally installed a louvered clothes dryer vent in my shop door, I screwed a muffin fan to the inside of the vent-blowing out & connected it to a 20' collapsable dryer hose (think slinky). The hose is easy to position on my soldering station & pulls away all smoke & fumes taking them directly outside, and at 20' its long enough to reach any point on my workbench. It stays there collapsed until I need to solder, then all I have to do is pull out & position the hose & plug in the fan. The fan was free, salvaged from an old computer, the vent & 20' of hose were about $20.00 @ Home Depot. Soldering has never been more fun & I'm glad....I am building about 100 patch & mic cables to upgrade every cable in the studio.
While I'm on the subject of cables...This weekend, at the suggestion of a Tapeop member, I bought a Brother P-Touch labelmaker. This thing is a great tool!
It uses 3/8" or 1/2" self adhesive label tape & prints labels that are the perfect size for labeling every cable in the studio....they are easy to read & have a very professional appearance, best of all the Office Depot price was $29.95. One more problem solved!...Only a staggering number remain!

Something I've often wondered about the smoke/steam that comes off of solder; do you think any of the metals actually get airborne, or do you think it's vapor from the core?

Google came up with the same one I use:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgu...%3Den%26sa%3DN

(OMG! That URL is six lines long!)

They're cheap but they work. I'm sure for closer to $20 you can get much better ones.

Just bought another 104 TRS jacks someone save me from this hell.... please

I feel your pain. Here is what I have to deal with the next week......:

50m of 8-pair Mogami cable
2 X 96 Bantam patchbay
192 EDAC connectors
576 crimp pins, which also has to be soldered, because of thin Mogami cable....
...and what seems like thousands of XLR-F, XLR-M and DSub connectors.

Arghhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

At least its my own studio....

Stein Tore

lol, crap ain't it! After a full day I'd only made 16 insert cables and about a dozen TRS to TRS. I've been at it all day how can I have got through so little????

16 insert cables and a dozen TRS-TRS in a day???? You're doing great, mate!

Stein Tore

Thanks bud! I've got "twist the copper cable" sore figures to prove it!

i'm cheap, so i use 2 pliers. one with rubber band tied at end, so it'll close on its own, and the other is a bigger one with some weight.

use the rubber band plier to hold connector in place, and use the weight plier to weigh down the cable. if you do it just right, it'll work.

check it out (note: no actual soldering taking place in pics. set up just for demo purpose )...

http://img239.imageshack.us/img239/7...dering19eq.jpg

http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/292...ngclose7fd.jpg

cool!heh

I had to solder an instrument cable a few weeks ago, and was having the same problem. I ended up putting the foot of a light chair on the jack ... . Won't go any further ...

I thought I was doing something wrong (new to this), but now I see I'm not the only one with these problems.

There must be an easier solution ... no ?

a helper!

I think everyone should own a Panavise. They're good for holding boards, but I wish they'd make a head that opened a bit further.

I found these little clamps with suction cups on them a while back and they work ok for soldering cable, actually not bad at all. Speaking of trs cables, you gotta try out the QUAD CABLE! My god, now that is a pain. 24awg wires and all 3 of my wire cutters only go to 20. I like the wire strippers that Max posted but can't find nothing around here. I remember owning a cheap pair way back but why are these so hard to find these days?


edit: Blueman714! Great idea! Although I think the lead has already gone to my head......

Sounds like a job for the Teledyne Stripall.

I can strip wire all day long and still be smiling at the end of it.

http://www.uneeda-audio.com used to make a pretty cool deal for holding the connectors while you soldered them, too...a similar thing isn't so hard to DIY.

Byron Jacquot