-: So we've already talked about how to make cables,
at least from the perspective of knowing
the right colors for the right ends.
If you want to straight-through cable, for instance,
you want to make sure you have orange-white,
orange, green-white, blue, blue-white, green,
brown-white, brown on both ends of your cable.
Then if you want to cross-over cable,
you're going to have that on one side,
but on the other side, you're going to use green-white, green,
orange-white, blue, blue-white, orange, brown-white, brown.
And really what we're doing there is we're switching pins
1, 2, 3, and 6 with pins 1, 2, 3, and 6
on the send and receive side of the cable.
Now, why am I bringing all that up?
Well, because I wanted to show you a couple of the tools
we use when we're building out these cables.
Whether you're making a straight-through or a cross-over,
these are going to be the tools you're going to use.
So here in front of me, you'll see I have
this one little kit that I've put together.
Now you can get everything you see here
for about $10 on Amazon if you're located in the US.
It'll come with a hundred of these end connectors,
which is what you put onto the cable on both ends
to plug it into the computer,
the switch, or the patch panel.
You'll also see we have the wire stripper.
This is going to be able to allow us to strip off
the outer sheath of the cable
so we can get to those inner eight wires
to be able to push them through
into the connectors and then crimp them.
And, as you can see here, we have an RJ45 crimper.
You'll see that it has a cutter here at the bottom,
and you can put it in there, squeeze it together,
and that will cut your cable.
And then up here at the top, we have three different sizes.
The one in the middle is RJ45,
which is an 8-wire pin, or 8P as it's called.
We have a 6-pin, which is going to be used for phone cables.
That would be something like an RJ11.
And then on the right side here, we have a 4-pin,
which should be used for some very strange connections
and, honestly, I've never used.
I've always used either the phone with the 6-pin
or the network with the 8-pin,
and that's what we're going to be focused on here today.
Now over here, you'll also see that I have a cable tester.
And so when I'm done making my cable,
I want to be able to test it and make sure it works properly.
And to do that, you simply are going to take it,
you're going to plug in the RJ45 connector
into the receiver here and the sender over here,
and then on the front of it,
we'll be able to see those cable connections,
those pins from here over to the other side.
And so if we're doing a straight-through cable
it's really easy 'cause 1 needs to match 1
and 2 needs to match 2,
but if we're doing a cross-over,
we need to remember those different pin outs
because it's going to look a little different.
So let me show you how this works with a real cable.
So if you want to make a cable,
you're going to start out with bulk cable.
And so I have right here, a nice piece of cable.
It's about maybe two feet long.
And you can see here on this end
that all those little individual wires are inside of it.
Now what I want to be able to do
is pull those inside wires out
and remove this outer sheathing
so that I can work with them and make a cable.
To do that, I'm going to use my wire stripper.
All you have to do is pinch on here, go down,
put it in there, and then you're just going to run your finger
around like that, and that's going to cut
the outer sheath only, and then I can just pull it off.
And now you can see those pairs of cables,
and we call them twisted pair
because they literally are twisted pairs.
You could see here is the brown and the brown-white.
Here is the green and the green-white.
The blue and the blue-white.
The orange and the orange-white.
Next, what we're going to want to do
is we're going to want to unwrap those cables,
and we're going to try to flatten them out as best we can.
What I like to do is I like to cut off
the excess that I don't need.
To do that, you're just going to put 'em in the crimper
and cut down and they'll get cut off.
Now at this point, what I want to do
is I want to put those into the end of the connector.
And to do that, you're just going to slide 'em in,
and each of those is going to end up getting
into the end of those pins here in the end.
Once you have it into the right position,
you're going to put it into the crimper,
and all you have to do is push down
and now you have a cable end that's made on the connector
and it's nice and solid.
You'll do the same thing on the other side,
and then you want to test the cable.
So let me go ahead and fast forward here a little bit
to a ready-made cable,
and I'm going to take my cable tester
and a ready-made little patch cable
that's a straight-through, just for this demonstration.
Now this does come apart so that I can have a long cable
and have it on one end and the other end if I need to.
What I'm going to do is I'm just going to flip this around,
so you can see it a little better,
and I'm going to connect that in.
Now when I turn this on,
you're going to see that that straight-through cable
they are going straight through,
and each pin is matching up with its own.
And this tells me that the cable's good.
It's that easy.
Now if it was a cross-over cable,
we'd be matching up pins 1, 2, 3, and 6
with the other side that matches up appropriately,
but this was a straight-through cable.
It's a patch cable, and you could see
that it worked and it's working just fine.
Now, do you have to be able to do this for the exam?
Do you have to be able to make a cable?
Well, no because you're going to be taking
the exam on a computer.
And so they can't hand you these tools
and ask you to make the cable.
Now in the real world,
how often are you going to make cables?
Well, it depends on your job.
I will tell you when I first started out 20 years ago,
I ran networks for a living and I made cables all day long.
The reason was cables that are pre-made
were very expensive back then,
so I could buy a thousand feet of bolt cable,
like I showed you with that gray wire, cut it, trim it,
and make the cable in just about 30 seconds to 60 seconds
because I did it all the time.
And I could charge my customers a dollar a foot
for running those cables,
so I made a lot of money doing that.
Nowadays, though, it's so cheap to buy ready-made cables.
And so, because of that, for something like a patch cable
like this, that's, you know, a six-inch cable,
I wouldn't spend my time making it
because I can buy this for about 10 cents.
So it's just a lot easier to buy them ready-made.
The same thing with the three-foot cables,
the six-foot cables, the 10, and the 15-foot cables.
Really, when I start making my own cables
is when I get into some weird lengths,
like 57 feet or something like that.
Now, the other thing to remember when you're making cables,
don't go over a hundred meters
because a Cat 5 cable can only go a hundred meters
before you start losing signal,
and so I like to keep my cables down under 90 meters.
That way I have a little bit of leeway
and I don't have any problems.
So if you keep all that straight in your head,
you'll do great on the exam.
And, again, if you want to try this stuff out,
it's not that expensive.
For $10 on Amazon, you get everything you need
in one convenient kit,
and you can go ahead and play with this at home,
and it'll give you a cable tester, a crimper, a stripper,
and about a hundred of those end pieces to start playing
and making your own cables and trying this out.