Making XLR Cables #2 - Tips Stripping and Shields (Public)

all right i'm dave rat and this is the second video in a series i'm doing on terminating xlr mic cables and talking about various aspects of everything involved from the tools we use the cable types and ways to optimize and let's get started so today let's look at the different types of cables and different types of wire strippers um first i want to show you the worst wire strippers you can possibly use and that is these kind of uh add-on that they put in the backside of some crimpers that say wire strippers any they're just terrible and first of all they're not sharp often and if they are sharp that's not ideal they're very rarely the right size and they just kind of tear the wire up and don't do a lot of good one of the most useful tools i like to use is a pair of wire shears these are general commercial electric but any good shears have especially if they have a little cut hole in there for cutting wire it's good extremely useful these have some strippers in them they're better than the ones on those but i do not recommend using them and the reason is you've got two sharp edges that come in from opposite angles and come around the cable and ideally don't mess with the copper inside and cut just through the plastic outside but if you're not perfectly centered in there or that those sharp edges come and they scratch the cup or any of those little wires or in a solid conductor the the internal wire there that little scratch that little nick is going to be a weak point and the most probable point that will fail and you can try that you can take a piece of solid wire and take a razor blade draw a line on it and then bend it and it'll break right where that razor blade line is so there's no reason to damage and reduce the reliability of the wires if we can avoid it so not using these razor type is wise let's look at some other strippers here here's another version of the same thing these ones here basically have two jaws that come down and grab around the wire and then another clamp that clamps onto the jacket and then it pulls them apart and these things work pretty well again i don't recommend them but if you're doing low you can kind of very handy so they can be very useful just be careful you do not want to see yeah see i have a little copper bit there so let's try that again and i'm going to make sure you do not want to see any um hairs hairs or copper threads coming out of and there's the end and let's see and we can flex these a bit and we did a good job we're not losing anything yeah we don't need every one of them but if you've cut a few you've probably nicked a few more and now you're down to a percentage now you have a weak point and that is going to reduce the longevity and uh quality of your final product okay so we'll look at this this is what we're called a serve shield and a serve shield is basically a bunch of conductive wires thin wires wrapped in a spiral around the inner core of the two wires on a mic cable and my cables typically have three conductors but not all and we'll look at some that have more they have the two center wires and some sort of shielding to protect it from outside interference the quality of the shielding can be quite important or non re irrelevant depending on the environments that you work in and the type of signals you're transporting if you're transporting line level signals over short distances in a place that doesn't places don't have a lot of rf and radio noise going on no dimmers and stuff like that the shielding is very does very little to affect the signal on the other hand mic level is extremely low volume and it might be 60 db quieter now 60 db is 10 to the six 10 to the six times lower voltage something in there i don't know if that mass quite right but it's a lot a million times 100 000 times less voltage so because of that when you gain it up and you utilize it in for mixing or the line level when you gain it up to in the mixing board it brings all the noise that it's picked up with it if it's a balanced line that'll cancel out some but having good shielding is important so having a serve shield the advantage of them is that they're more flexible they tend to be less expensive and they're easy to terminate and do some other things so there's a inexpensive serve shield connector this next one has a serve shield as well and i've already stripped it and you can kind of see the spiral there and it's a um there we go nice copper serving the feet but when you when you work with it if you pull it off evenly you can see you get all the hairs now this this is i just said that my cables have typically three wires two center conductors and a um a shield well this one has four conductors it's got two blue and two white and a little center filler here that um we'll cut off now what this is is this is a taking it to the other extreme instead of having even though it has a serve shield which is not the highest amount of shielding what they've done here is they've used a quad core and the two ways that my cables prevent interference from two of the ways they prevent interference is one is blocking it with the shield and two is to use a balanced line we have two conductors with um each carrying the signal they can be equal and opposite or they can just be let's say a balanced line their balance line traveling down and the input looks at the difference between them input the mixing board and anything that's common to both of them gets canceled gets uh cancelled out so that's called common mode rejection so any noise that's induced will get cancelled out well if you have two wires that are just spun together the any noise that gets on one is almost exactly going to get on the other one but the key word there is almost exactly because they're two you theoretically could have a noise source that's a little closer to one wire more often than the other wire but having four wires then you've increased the probability that they're going to see the same signal introduced the same amount of noise is going to affect both of them and your cancellation will be improved so they've added the extra wire and also with the four wires it's more like a square it's more round so it's more uniform in its um coming down the middle and then you've got the serve going around the outside so it improves rejection so even though the shielding is not as high as it could be the core and the the balance line uh makes up for that or attempts to make up for that okay so there's the quad let's take a look at another one oh should i use these strippers sure and okay here's an interesting one and i didn't this one barely has any wires on it it's got a lot of very fine copper but not a lot of a very fine copper but not a lot of them but we can see that there's a shiny foil that's wrapping around the center core and this is actually a dmx cable with and when you've put the foil around it you actually get 100 percent shielding and we'll see various forms of that as well where what we'll do is let's go ahead and check this foil out so i'm going to take my meter and that's measuring at that speed it should be okay so we can see that it's conductive and the conductive aspect of it was facing outward towards the serve shield so it's wrapped around this foil and um providing 100 um shielding which is wonderful um the downside of foil shielding is it tends to make the wires more stiff now this one's stiff anyway it's got a rigid hard jacket to it but in general it makes it more stiff because you've got this kind of film around it instead of fibers that can move another challenge with foil shielding is flexibility not only flexibility but durability if you take foil and you bend it back and forth and back and forth and it's wrapped around the wires it stretches that mylar the plastic that the aluminum is is coated on and it'll form little cracks over time and you go the other way and those little cracks will form little rings and even though they're connected together by the serve shielding they make little connections and disconnections and that can turn into noise and also your shielding dis degrades over time and we'll see that with old snake systems now with snakes we've got a larger diameter cable that doesn't bend on a very tight uh radius and you've got a bunch of different foil shielded cables that can slide against each other you know it'll last a good long time but the foil does tend to degrade over time and it will it can become noisy all right so let's move on here's a install grade now foil is excellent for install grade where you get a very high amount of um of shielding it's inexpensive and easy to work with so i just stripped that off the foil actually came off with the plastic surround and this is ready to terminate okay and one the next one i'll show you actually the strippers that i do like so let's go ahead and my favorite strippers uh whenever andy you know not every tool works for every job are these um they're kind of like a a nipper they've got a they've got a uh a little grab like a little fingernail to come out and grab not sharp but not dull and then a friction part with some spines on it and you put that in there and when you let's put it in let's go this way put it in there and it pulls the thing off and it uses friction and grab now the downside is it kind of deteriorates and it's a real rubbery uh um surround on there if the jackets will rubbery sometimes it'll stretch too much and not work but for a lot of cables it'll grab it and it very rarely damages anything inside um and here we can see we've got a little bit of um nylon or some sort of fiber and then we've got our foil shield now this one unlike the serve shield that was for the mic cable the portable one this has got the foil with the conductor pointed inward and a single drain wire instead of a serve shield and this would be like an install grade or a snake system would be you'd see this quite commonly okay let's move on to here is a braid shield now this is a copper braid now sometimes we'll see that it's copper colored sometimes we'll see that it's kind of a matte uh you know white metal colored or tin because it's usually a tinned wire so it's tinned copper it's still copper but it's got a metal coating on it to protect it and make it easy to solder i guess so this has got a braid shield so we're terminating a braid shield we're going to want to separate the braids and do this again i do this over a clean table we want if you're seeing hairs if you're seeing the um conductors fall off as you do this then you've done it wrong you're messing up you really don't want to see anything removed and there we go so there's a couple hairs off so i would consider that pretty close to a fail but i'm not being careful here another way to do that with braids instead of separating like that is to poke a hole in the side of the braids and separate them out and then pull the wires through now this wire is this cable is especially interesting because we're we've pulled it off now we've got a wrap and then we've got some cotton fibers which i will cut away here with my scissors and cool now you can see that they're both black um that um you know we need to know which one's which so why have they made them both black and i've seen people i've seen and this is actually something to be really um i'm gonna just score it slightly but these tend to be when you see that when you see that they're both black like this or there's no differentiation between them it's actually a very soft rubber you can actually dig your fingernail in and pull them off i'm going to [Music] use this stripper that i told you not to use because we're not going to go all the way through we're just barely going to nick it there and just pull off the outside and here we see we have red and blue so why do they put this extra black jacket on there great question let's go ahead and meter it it's probably doing something and i bet i know what it is so i got this set at 2k so now we're going to see if we can get this guy to stand still and that's with about a mil couple three millimeters or sixteenth of an inch between them i'm measuring about 53 ohms and i get closer to 34. this half inch piece is measuring about 220 ohms so this is conductive plastic it's a flexible material that conducts electricity and so what they've done is coated these individual wires with conductive plastic that you remove off that would give them a hundred percent shielding now what i find interesting is you'll find two different types of conductive plastic many types but two of the types of conductive plastic cables is you'll find ones that are isolated where you've got the serve shield and then there's a bunch of wraps or some sort of insulator and then conductive plastic over the individual wires and then you'll find ones that are more like this one we had with the serve shield over the outward facing aluminum where the conductive plastic is constantly shorting to the serve shield or the braid shield and providing 100 shield so this one here even though we've got shielding over each individual wire these do not they i don't believe they touch each other and i know they don't touch the serve shield so we don't see any conductivity between the conductive plastic and the copper shield it's open and we can check and there's no conducting now you put it way high oh yep we are seeing conductive between the two but not to the outside shield there so i'm not really sure what's going on with that but it's um it is a formal connection now one of the things you really want to pay attention to if you're terminating conductive plastic um cables with conductive plastics make sure you strip them way back down because if you leave the conductive plastic all the way up i've seen people not remove it just look at the end to figure out the color and it could be very close to the terminal it can actually touch the cup of the connector and create a intermittent connection or create noise because that this is a conductor and you do not want it to touch anything it shouldn't be touching and it should only touch ground cool all right next let's take a look at what else do we got okay here is one that is a serve shield a cir yeah serve shield that we can see that's been tinned it's got a copper silver color to it and if we peel this back we actually see a kind of an aluminum it's not white it looks like it's metallic looking paper covering the conductors so again none of this stuff is by accident it's not just well maybe it is on some things but rarely is this stuff on accident there's probably a purpose that they spent money on this so let's go ahead and check that out and measuring the inside of this i see oh there it is okay yeah so we're seeing a very low resistance here and without letting them touch each other we see um that it's not a great conductor but it is um yeah there it is okay so we are seeing this is a conductive paper surround that is being used to increase the shielding and the conducting was on the inside it's again it's against the wire and it's not touching the serve so it's a a separate isolated just shielding piece that is not connected to ground but it is a metallized paper wrapped around the internal conductors all right now we're going to get into the difficult to terminate wires um one of those wires is called the belden 8412 now i've pre-stripped this and i've also slid it with a razor blade and we can see there's a bunch of hairs in there a bunch of threads multi-colored threads and as i peel them you can see that the outer jacket is actually clinging to those threads they're bonded to it so i think they've wrapped the threads and then put the jacket around probably because the jacket might and then the threads do have some slip to them on top of the braid that we see here and the reason that's important is the way that the different materials inside of a cable interact and slide against each other has an impact on the flexibility and the longevity the durability of the cable and so this one appears that the rubber is bonded to the outside but i can feel see i can slip the i can move the jacket on top of the braid so it does have some give there and then here we've got a very tight braid pulling it back we've got some burlap strings and then this rubber here this is almost like on a power cable like on a sj cable or an sjo rubber cable it's got that real rubber it's kind of oily feeling uh not oily but very rubbery okay so let's take a look at the other one and i believe this one might be the 8412 but i'm not sure and this one i have not slit yet so i'm going to cut that with the razor blade and typically to cut a cable like this but now this one if i remember correctly it's been a while yep again it's bonded to it now here instead of multi-colored wires we see this thing now this one here these wires are not able to slide i cannot slide the jacket on top of the the braid they are bonded together it's been um they've been merged or fused together and here again we see a very tight braid now the braids tend to be you know in the 80 percent they can be as high as 90 something and then you start adding those other conductive plastic or foil you get in the hundreds or nine high 90s all right so let's take a look at this and for this one um i will spread this out and this you know when you're terminating a bunch of cables getting into this braid stuff where you're having to separate this stuff like this over and over again this takes time and it's um really increases the amount of effort involved and cost the reason i was bringing up the sliding of the cable and whether it's bonded to it um this first of all let me say this is one of the most robust cables it is extremely strong it's extremely durable it's got um this cotton it's got a high pull strength i mean for a singer that just wants to uh you know pearl jam eddie we'd use these for eddie vedder in early days of projam when he was climbing stuff and he would throw a mic cable he'd throw his microphone up over the lighting truss and then feed it up into the mic drop grab the mic sing it to it and then climb up 30 feet in the air on a mic cable and for that 8412 was the way to do it because this stuff is strong um all right let's take a look at the inside now i believe these not oh no we're not even done with the fun part of an 8412 well it didn't happen here there's actually wraps on these individual um cores as well this one didn't have it i'm not sure maybe it's not 8412 here but i remember the 8412 has the wraps all right we're not seeing that in any case we don't um bonding of the jacket to the um shield when the jacket the rubber jacket is bonded to the shielding and you've got your connector and your connector strain relief is grabbing the shielding it's grabbing the cable and it's pinching it however it grabs it well if the jacket can't slide against the braid or against the serve when you turn that angle there it puts a lot of stress on the metal wires right at the exit of the connector and so you'll find that these cables that are you know 10 years old they've been around for quite a while will tend to fail right they'll have a ring of broken um shield right around the exit of the connector whereas if it can slide it can distribute that stress and the internals can slide and the the braid can move and while they may fail they don't fail as consistently right at that exact point at those grab points so that was the downside of the 8412 which was an extremely robust cable and there's a bunch of cables in that realm that have that high robust high strength all right um strippers what else can we do we could look at a couple more um stripping bits i will flip this off uh here's another stripper these ring strippers this is a platinum tools this is for cat5 cat6 but it also can work on cable um i'm not going to use it on that one let's try it on this one and it can work on audio cable and just go around and pull that off these ones you know you again if you've got these set properly um this one's got some you can open it up and there's a little razor blade in here there's two different heights um and um you can get ones that don't since they grab around the surround quite a bit and the razor blade is in there they've got a fixed depth which it can dig into and if you d if you do if it's set for a little bit lower than the total depth to get through then you know the internal wires and jack the metal stuff you don't want to damage is protected here's a cool one this one is um comes in handy as well it's also a cat 5 stripper but it works for a lot of things and this is a jokari and it has a little set screw here so you can actually adjust the depth of how deep the secondary one goes in but that's for the smaller wires the big one let's give it a shot and you can kind of see on a little measuring gauge you can pinch it there and just twist around and i typically like to bend it if i can rather than pull it straight off so it doesn't break it up so what i've done here is i haven't gone all the way through and since i don't know this cable i will um uh and i've done a bunch of okay so yeah so you pull this off maybe there we go and again no hair is coming off or copper wires is a good sign um all in all let's give it a shot we'll do one more bit um let's give these that to me i'll just try all these cables with the friction grabbers so i had to turn it and do it twice but there's some mic cables and we've done no damage to the cables oh that one's got a little bit coming off um the other has very thin wires okay so yeah the all-in-all is this kind of friction type cutters and you can buy nice ones of these they tend to be my favorite tool for stripping wires we've gone over various cables serve shield braid shields and conductive plastic as well as foil paper and aluminized mylar that should do it for this one in all right that should do us for this one in the next one i will cover uh shrink wrap strategies um different ways to increase durability of the cable um and the advantages and disadvantages of using more or less uh shrink wrapped uh pins and connections um i'll talk about cable testing um failure types um how the cables go bad and we'll look at a whole bunch of cables that i opened up that found various issues with that i recommend we don't manufacture with and cool that should do it awesome so thank you for hanging out and i hope you found this video and others that i do interesting and informative and check out soundtools.com take a look at the products i personally designed some solutions for the pro audio industry analog over cat5 a bunch of testers and other useful tools ratsound.com has got our sales department rental department install department we sell a wide variety of pro audio and av gear we do installations small to large and we do rentals for everything as small as local clubs and backyard parties all the way up to coachella festival and artists like pearl jam jack johnson blink182 and thanks for hanging out [Music] [Music] um

Channel: Dave Rat

Views: 16,315

Keywords: Dave Rat, xlr connector soldering, Making XLR Cable, Solder XLR Cables, making an xlr cable, Solder mic cable, Making Mic Cable, Making Mic Cable Tips, XLR wiring, xlr connector wiring, how to solder, solder mic cable xlr, Strip and tin, strip and tin wire, xlr wiring connection, wiring xlr connectors, how to make a microphone cable, Wire Strippers, quad mic cable, Foil shield Mic Cable, Conductive plastic shield cable, Cable strippers

Id: o1T2lpl2Tcs

Length: 31min 31sec (1891 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 06 2021