While all my home wiring is inspired by the jerry-rigged Apollo 13 replacement CO2 scrubber, others might find more inspiration in doing it the way NASA does it when time is less of a factor. Toolmonger has spotted the NASA Workmanship Technical Committee’s guides to proper installation, including a full guide for “Wiring and Cabling.”
I’m sold. From now on I will outsource all my wiring to the lowest bidder. (I kid because I love, Dear Space Program!)
Project Page [Workmanship.NASA.gov via Toolmonger]
I have been using wax lacing cord for years. I work in telco, where it is the standard way to lash one thing to another. I don’t understand why it isn’t more popular, it creates really nice harnesses for things like your AV and computer cabling. It’s cheap, and easier to remove than zip ties.
If you have access, Telcordia GR-1275 also has a nice guide to using lacing cord. It has replaced duct tape for me. I always keep some on hand. It’s way more permanent than duct tape for most applications.
All I want to know is how the Eskimos do it? Do you know what “catgut” it? It’s what guitar-like musical instruments used to use for strings. It’s sausage (animal intestine) with no ground hoof and snout stuffing, twisted and stretched to form perfect lacing cord.
That wax coated stuff was traditionally made of super strong (semi-crystalline) nylon in which individual fibers were very tiny.
In a bind? Just ask any jail guard. The strongest suicide noose or wall climbing rope isn’t a few tied together bedsheets. It’s dental floss.
Dental floss is wonderful for sewing leather, and can be colored to match with a Sharpie after-wards (even better if you use unwaxed floss). Just use a long nose pliers to force it through (since leather is tougher than the skin on your thumb). In a bind, use a Dremel tool or big needle to pre-cut stitching holes in the leather. Tandy Leather even sells an S&M looking roller for making a line of indented stitch location marks. For thin leather, thread the needle once. For cowhide, use thread it several times to get a good thickness of cord. Finally, since the knots or doubled up stitch ends with another drugstore wonder: Super Glue!
Kevlar thread is becoming easier to find (McMaster.com, for instance) and also works like floss, and accepts super glue better than nylon (thread or floss). McMaster also sells an adhesion promoter for nylon though.
As an aside to this digression, a comment about NASA. Time was, engineering types just sort of *knew* this stuff, as a rule of thumb. But then busybodies got jobs there, and started making life hell for the workers. Granted, if you don’t account for every screw in the building, one might float around in zero gravity and zap your satellite circuitry, but that’s why you shake the thing to listen for loose screws. Oh, wait, that’s not in the manual of what torque to put screw number #1099XB which was made by million dollar lathe for that specific hole. O.K., so the MANUAL says #1099XB was placed into the hole at 10:22AM using checked-out screwdriver #342XB. Then they use metric to program the landing computer, while the guys who build the thruster use English, so $300 screw #1099XB is now broken in two, half a mile underground, far far away.