Cable Sleeving Part 1
On my previous build, I had 2 major cable sleeving sessions: the Thermaltake Armor internal cables, and the Vantec Nexus 205-B cables. As such, I have gotten used to the nice look of sleeved cables and in fact have become quite proficient in the process. Considering I was anticipating having to lap a new CPU cooler to fit my black theme, I figured this would be one of my easier and less time consuming "mods" anyway so there was no reason not to do it.
Since I am going to keep the Antec Tri-Cool fans in the case in order to maintain their built-in fan controller capabilities, I needed to sleeve each of the fan cables as well as the usual front panel cables, so there was a fair amount of work ahead of me.
I am a firm believer in using things around the house to get the job done rather than buying new tools, so you will see things like my Leatherman, glasses screwdrivers, and a hair dryer lying around in these pictures as I use them to do much of the work rather than paying for needless, more expensive "specialized" equipment. (We'll get to my lapse in judgment regarding the purchase of a Molex pin remover later...)
As you can see, there are lots of cables to sleeve! There is also the issue of the white wire bundle clip at the top of the case (why paint the case black and use a white clip? Stupid Antec!) that I will probably replace as well at some point but for now it'll remain.
I did not want to sleeve wires I wasn't sure I was going to use, so I only sleeved the LED and switch wiring.
Fortunately Antec decided to use black wiring for the USB and SATA cabling so if I do use those I won't have to sleeve anything - a simple black zip tie will do the trick. You can see that I did not sleeve all the way to the base of the front panel like I did with my Armor. This is because I could not find a simple way to remove the front panel like with the Armor, so there was not much room to maneuver my hands - I instead moved the sleeving up far enough so that there is no noticeable difference unless one were to actually crane his or her head inside my case to view back there, so good enough.
Another view of the front panel sleeving completed:
Things look much nicer, but the fan cables now stick out so they are next in line for the spa treatment.
Due to the configuration of the Tri-Cool cables through the wire clips on the side of the drive bays, sleeving those would not have been an option - cables would be too big and the clips were a pain to get the wires in and out of. Instead, I sleeved far enough so that the shrink tubing went behind the drive bays but not far enough to interfere with the wire clips of the drive bay. However, this wasn't the only issue with sleeving these cables! They are all pass-through Molex plugs, and despite my research no one had made any guides or explanations as to how to dismantle such a plug. Furthermore, a thread asking about this on these forums received little attention, so I had to wing it. As it turns out, there is a little door on the two wires that are actually connected on the pass-through plug:
Once the door is pried open, the Molex plugs can be removed and the sleeving and heat shrink tubing slid over the top, as seen below:
You will notice that the aforementioned "door" is open in this image; it simply snaps shut when the plugs and wires are in the proper positions. I would like to add that I purchased a "
universal Molex plug remover," but it was a colossal waste of money. Back by popular demand my arse - FrozenCPU lied to me! The remover didn't even work well for the male plug, which has a larger diameter! Using a small flathead screwdriver (the size that would be use for repairing a pair of glasses) worked much better and didn't cost me a thing.
Repeating the Molex removal and sleeving process for each of the 120mm fans made things look much nicer...
After about half an hour of attempting to remove Antec's Big Boy 200mm fan, I gave up and decided to do something similar to the front panel and just sleeve it enough that any viewer would not know the difference. Unfortunately, I also ran out of sleeving at this stage, but it was my last fan to sleeve and the wires were near an opening behind the motherboard tray so I was able to avert a catastrophe. The following picture illustrates the small amount of sleeving I had left as well as how close to the fan I had the sleeving go.
With all the sleeving completed, the final step was of course to put everything back into the case, and voila!
I hope you agree that it looks much better than before! I realize most of these cables will be hidden behind the motherboard tray anyway, but it can never hurt to make things look nice even when they can't be seen. You may also notice that on some of the above pictures it appears as though the sleeving is very thin and all but transparent. This effect occurs because the sleeving is shiny and my camera felt it necessary to use a flash in order to produce a decent digital image, so the light was bounced around inside the sleeving and lit up the wires. In normal lighting the cables look more like that last image I showed - black!
So that's it for now. Stay tuned for my next entry!
P.S. After typing this, I added "sleeving" to my browser's dictionary. So many red lines...