Pro Tips for Terminating Male CAT 6 cables?

[MCDELTAT]

I’m in the middle of helping a friend of mine who’s opening a business do his networking. Cable is pulled, all the female Ethernet Jacks and Keystones are done, but now I’m on an annoyingly tricky part.

 

The office didn’t have much space so he went against having a patch bay, and instead wanted to terminate directly into the 24 Port Managed Switch.

 

Im familiar with the color codes for the Male RJ-45 connector and method. I even dug up an old NCIX video to make sure I wasn’t dumb, but it’s taking far too long to do a single termination. My issues:

 

1) One or more of the strands doesn’t go into the housing slot.

2) 7/8 go in, but one bends in the middle and doesn’t go in.

3) Despite being in the correct order before insertion, the forces acting on them make strands swap places.

 

So what pro tips do you have to avoid any of those? It took me ~25 minutes to do 2 male terminations, so I obviously need to cut that time down.

 

 

[WereCatf]

1 minute ago, MCDELTAT said:

1) One or more of the strands doesn’t go into the housing slot.

2) 7/8 go in, but one bends in the middle and doesn’t go in.

3) Despite being in the correct order before insertion, the forces acting on them make strands swap places.

 

So what pro tips do you have to avoid any of those? It took me ~25 minutes to do 2 male terminations, so I obviously need to cut that time down.

I've had to make a bunch of RJ45-cables recently myself and, oh god, I hate it! Unfortunately, I have no advice to give because I struggle with this shit myself, too.

[thepanda66]

Cabling is one of those things that just take practice. I've done many cables myself and still struggle sometimes. 

[Bearded_Ed]

I've recently had to do a few for at home.   I say had... I wanted to make some really short custom length ones for our setup.

 

It's a fiddly faff that's for sure!  I did see something about some RJ45 plugs with a "load bar" which seems like a great idea actually and may help you with speeding things up?

 

[Slayerking92]

Using pass-through crystals help a lot for getting the right order, and making sure the pins contact the wire. Then you just trim after crimp.

 

[scottyseng]

I would definitely recommend a keystone patch panel if you can fit one...trying to direct terminate to a switch is risky (If you screw up and the wire ends up short, you're screwed).

Otherwise, I would recommend the pass through connectors shown above and the klein tools pass through crimper. They got a lot faster than the regular jacks (which are hard to cut to the right length)

 

It's definitely a practice makes perfect kind of thing. It used to take me a while but now I can do it semi fast after having to do so many to terminate my house.

 

Also make sure you have a ethernet jack tester to make sure you got the connection right. Sometimes it's easy for that one wire to go in the wrong spot.

[Scheer]

Lots of practice is pry the only way. Really the only trick I know of is to strip the jacket, straighten the wires and sort them in order, then I pinch with my nail right next to the jacket to hold them in order while bending a flexing the ends a little bit so they are all nice and straight. Trim to length and insert into the connector, should take right around a minute per start to finish.

 

Pass-thru EZ-RJ45's are awesome, but do get expensive... I've never tried the knockoffs from Amazon but it looks like only $35 for the crimpers so I may have to grab some.