Does anyone here still use lacing twine in their equipment?

I was just re-lacing the cabling in an old EQ/compressor which I had cut off earlier to trace the wire bundle. I got out the RS black lacing twine and needle and re-loomed it nice and neatly, and it occured to me that most DIY'ers have probably never seen laced wiring, as I usually see bundles of wires just cable tied together in the projects that folks photograph and put up for us to see.

Properly formed and laced cabling makes projects look a million bucks, and is fun and fairly simple to do, definately ultra-neat and retro looking, much better than cable ties. Anyone else here use this method, or is it a dying art?

[quote author="Steve Jones"]Anyone else here use this method, or is it a dying art?[/quote]
I was tought the "art" at technical school in the early nineties. We had to use it for all the projects we made - we didn't think it was fun back then :wink:

Best regards,

Mikkel C. Simonsen

It's slow, but it's marvellous!

I have lots of cream coloured lacing cord, but no black... :sad:

Keith

As an apprentice for Telecom in the very early 80's I am sure I used a good couple of miles of the cream wax type literally forming massive cable looms in the exchanges in Brisbane. But by the time I finished my apprenticeship Crossbar exchanges where being installed and this extreme neatness was thrown out the door and cables where run in straight line of site across an artificial ceiling of grid mesh. I wish had taken some photo's as after running some 50 miles of 50pair cream cable it looked like a huge desert of sand dunes taking up a whole skyscraper floor. Cable ties then took over.

Joe

We still use a fair amount of lacing twine at my job.

Ok you are making me feel old.
Seen it in equipment.
Saw on guy using it at work once.
I did not stay around to "learn" how to do it.
I wish I had.
Any books of web resources?

Anybody have a picture of this? :?: :?:

Some of the finest wax cotton looms I've seen were in vintage German gear such as TFK, Neumann and K+H.

Is there is a particular tool helpful to the process? If they did it manually then they certainly took pride in the job!

J

You just need the lacing twine, which you can get from RS, and a lacing needle, which is just a curved, rather thick blunt darning needle with a large eye, about 2 inches long - just get one from any sewing shop and file the tip blunt. The needle can be any type really, it doesn't matter as long as you can thread it easily. I don't even bother with a needle if it's a small job.

You dress the bundle of cables neatly together, into a tidy bundle all aligned together, and tie off a loop of the twine at one end. Then you run the twine along the cable bundle in a straight line, and every cm or 2 you loop the twine around the bundle, and pass it over itself once, and continue on. It is simple, you don't really even need a needle. There are only 2 ways to loop the twine, the correct way is to do it so that it locks itself down with each loop. Single strand, just tie the other end to the needle when you start off.

Here's how to do it, don't worry about the forming board, just do it in situ.

http://www.dairiki.org/hammond/cable-lacing-howto/

The instructions are toward the bottom, don't be put off by the complicated looking Navy knots, just follow the simple diagram right at the very bottom of the page at the left side.

Definately makes gear look great, I learned it in the same place as Joe, in older pre-crossbar telephone exchanges. If you are doing it on slippery Teflon cable, a drop of superglue on the first knot will stop it slipping on the bundle.

I use it all the time (black) and have since the early 1970's. I love it. The only photo I have handy as an example (and not a very good one at that) is at this link...

http://forsselltech.com/FetCode%20Inside.htm

That's some nice lacing Fred, I was always supplied white waxed twine at work, but black is all that I can find now from RS, but it looks better anyway. Lots of tubes in there, what is that?

Lots of tubes in there, what is that?

Click to expand...

That's a photo of the inside of my FetCode mike preamplifier. I call it the "FetCode" because it uses a cascode diff-amp front-end with the lower element in each cascode being a JFET instead of a tube. It's all tube after that expect for the JFET constant current sources used to bias various stages of tube circuitry.

I used it last week at work on a test bench.
Props for Steve Jones!
The most important part of lacing is in his post.
Pass the beezwax, wiill ya!
cj