Hello. I'm Mercy with Discount-Low-Voltage.com, and we're going to go over a quick fiber
optic termination how-to demo here. Now, on my left hand side here I have some of the older style fiber optic connectors where you've got to use some glue, you've got to polish them, you've got to use the oven. There's a lot of labor involved that way. These connectors are a lot cheaper, but labor-wise they suck - just too much work. Assembly houses still do use these to keep the cost of fiber optic patch cords down, but other than that, that's pretty much the most commonly
used connector for this connector nowadays.
Now, over the past 10 years, we've come to the AFL fiber optic fast connector. This is a very
easy connector to terminate. They really focused on making it really no labor for you. They cut down the labor, and how they did that was, they went ahead and put a piece of
fiber optic glass in there for you, and did the hard part, with the polishing, at the factory. When you get this at your door, you're already good to go.
Basically what we're going to do is we're going to cut the glass, we're going to cleave it to what the manufacturer specifies into the fiber
optic connector and then I'm going to show you how this closes together to keep the connector inside with the fiber.
First we're going to go ahead and strip off some six strand fiber optic cable. This is an indoor/ outdoor type buffered multi mode cable. It's probably the most commonly sold fiber nowadays, especially for building the building type applications. What we're going to do, there we go, there's the Kevlar. It's very flexible. That's another reason why a lot of people, contractors, like to work with this stuff. Especially around the bends in the conduit. So let's just go ahead and pull a strand out of there.
Okay, now the next step is to go ahead and strip the jacket off the glass.
So I'm using an ideal light strip fiber stripper it has a few different sizes here and covers everything you'll bump
into out in the field it saves you the cost of strip fiber strip where it's got a few different sizes here for fiber optic cable, and it basically covers everything that you're going to bump into out in the field. It saves you the cost of buying another tool in the long run for a different size of fiber and then possibly even a third tool down the road. Now we're going to go ahead and put the fiber into the appropriate notch here and then one of the things that I've found over the past few years is with these fiber strippers, you're going to want to go ahead and give it a quick squeeze. That way it grabs the jacket better and it cuts it a lot better. If you go too slow it feels like it's not cutting the ... it's just one of those things you'll have to get a feel for down the road, so you can get better at stripping the fiber off of the cable. There we go. Now there's a piece I've done. Let's go ahead. I think I need a little bit of a longer piece. We're going to go ahead and review the steps you just did and give it another quick squeeze. Just slightly, you'll get a feel for it. You'll start feeling it slowly come off the glass and then you'll feel a little bit of a break.
Now this does take a little bit of time but I would buy a little extra, just so you can get a better feel for terminating, going through the step by step. Maybe buy some extra if you want to start off doing this and play with it for a little while.
Now, our next step is to cleave the fiber.
Okay, so we're going to use a Corning fiber cleaver. They call this their field cleaver. It's probably one of the most popular cleavers, just because of the price. It's fairly inexpensive and it'll do multi-mode. Not single-mode, you don't really bump into single-mode that often. Most of the time you're going to be working with multi-mode.
We're going to go ahead and slide our cleaved or stripped fiber into the cleaver and we're going to go ahead and cleave it. As you can tell right here, we've got another notch that's going to hold the glass down. This part's going to come down and cleave the glass and then we're going to give it a bend to go ahead and make the fiber pop up to where we need it to be cut at.
Now the manufacturer of the connector says we should cleave it at a 10.5 for this style connector, for the Sam Charlie. It'll be different for the ST's, the LC's. You'll notice the measurements here, it says 11 and 14. You might want to consider getting a cleaver that has a better measurement system. Those will cost a little bit more money but it shouldn't' be too much. We're going to go ahead and eyeball the 10 1/2 here, just so you guys can get a feel for what I'm doing.
So that's probably about right. I've worked with this cleaver many times in the past and I've terminated quite a few of these and I've got it right most of the time. Now, as you can tell, back there we have our glass that's going to be held in place. There we go. Then we're going to want to go ahead and just give it a cleave. Press down, it's not going to cut it, it just cleaves it. You won't really feel anything when you do it. It doesn't feel like anything is going on. Then you let it go, there we go. It popped right up, right where we cleaved it and that's basically all you're going to do here with the cleaver. Now we have our glass cut to length to what the manufacturer recommends we put the fiber into the connector.
Okay, now we're going to insert the cleaved fiber into the connector and sorry if I'm a little shaky, I've had a lot of coffee this morning. One thing I do want to mention, with this connector that's included with the cost at no additional charge is they do give you a lot of different boots here. A lot of different, even a tube here if you're working with a loose tube fiber, in order to, it gives you a little bit of extra support for the connector and the fiber.
This boot here is going to go with this fiber, but I definitely should have put it on before I stripped and cleaved it. We're just going to put it on the other end, so that way it doesn't mess with our cleaved, stripped glass that we already worked on. Now the connector, basically it's already open from the manufacturer. We're just going to want to slide the fiber all the way in until you feel like you've got it all in there. The manufacturer, what they want you to do is they want you to put a little bit of a bend on there to make sure you have it all the way into the appropriate area.
Now, there we go, it's in there. That was basically it. What this connector has inside of it, it's got two cams to where, when you purchase it the cams are open, you're going to want to slide your glass in there. It's got these two prongs that go ahead and you squeeze this tab out and it closes the cams inside of it gripping your connector.
Before you take out this little tool that's attached to the connector you'll see these two clear areas, your next step is to attach a visual fault finder and it's basically a laser that you're going to install onto the end of it and it's going to shoot a red laser through it and if you have a good connection you won't get any light through either one of these clear tabs. If you have problems, if you didn't measure it right, something went right, it'll light up red. It's a good tool to help you on your installation. Then the next step is to go ahead and take the tool off and now your boot here, go ahead and put this boot back on. Then you're going to want to slide the boot right on over. That's basically it. You're going to unscrew the top that's included to protect the nice clean area there. Plug it in, do whatever you're doing , and that is it. This is way easier than when I first started 12 years ago. These connectors do
cost more but on the labor end of it your going to love it. This is a lot easier than when I first started doing it 12 years ago. These connectors do cost a bit more than the oven bake connectors but on the labor end of it, you're going to love it. Thanks for visiting. You can order online and questions, call us, 888-797-3697.
