Making the Jumpers
After another long hiatus, and with the Seaboard Southern Show now only a few weeks away, I sat down this evening with a film on Amazon Prime, two rolls of cable, a bunch of banana plugs and sockets plus some chocolate blocks and proceeded to make up the jumper cables for connecting power to adjacent boards.
Here’s the work area and tools laid out, with three cables already made up. It’s not a big tool kit for this job; ruler, cutters, strippers and screwdriver.
The cutting mat is just to keep the tools up together, rather than spreading them around the entire floor as I work!
Each board requires one plug and one socket each in red and black, so I’ve got four full sets to make up.
I jury-rigged a cable reel as well, to stop the two large spools rolling around the room. You might recognise the IKEA Komplement shoe rack from their Pax wardrobe range!
The folding wooden ruler is ideal for jobs like this, as it’s heavy and sturdy enough to remain where it’s placed.
There’s a lot of jumper cables left on those spools, as I bought 100m of each!
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- 1″ of stripped wire is twisted …
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- … then folded in half and twisted again …
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- … and finally one more time
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- The plug or socket is firmly screwed onto the end …
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- … and the cable cut to 18″ including the body of the connector
Here’s the basic process of making up each wire. This process was repeated four times for each of the four boards, so 16 cables in total.
Tomorrow’s job is to solder them to the boards.