I'm trying VERY hard to battle my anger and bittterness regarding what has beset me and what toll it has taken on me physically as well as the toll it has taken psychologically and most critically, the toll it continues to exact upon my family.
My friends feel helpless and awkward; "what do you do? How do you deal or comfort someone going through something as strange and hellish as this?"
Unfortunately, I'm true to form and have no answers whatsoever at this point.
I would think as I expect you would think as well, that my prayer life should be alive and thriving, given SO many things to pray over, about and through, but, the fact is that my prayer life is minimal at best; full of self pity and unanswerable questions that I know are such.
I'm done for today.
What follows next is a simple read about how to clean and wrap cables. Something I know.
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Cabling and Cable Treatment:
Why to clean up cables (Practical Standpoint)
Cables are often treated as just a means to an end and there is often a thought process that “you just need plenty of cables and if one breaks you just buy another and keep rolling; don’t slow the train down with a bunch of house keeping.”. Often considered purely expendable and treated as such. One of the unwritten laws in audio control is that your signal is only as good and strong as its weakest link in the audio chain and that means that your cables should be considered as important and in some respects, as fragile as other pieces of your audio arsenal. Cables that are allowed to remain sticky and gummy from being covered by ducting tape or inferior gaff tape will swiftly become cables chosen to stay away from due to the mess they create when they are used. The gummy residue left by tape covering a cable on a floor, a pole, a stand or wall is caused by temperature changes for the hotter and the tape being left in place longer than the tape’s adherent capabilities to remain intact, which in turns means that the adhering chemical “goo” no longer stays only on the fabric it was originally bonded to as “Gaff Tape” but now passes it’s stickiness along to whatever it was taping down.
Long story abbreviated: once you have a cable that has old tape residue on it, or a cable with fine dirt or dust, sand, glitter etc., that cable will inevitably share its coating with every single other cable or piece of equipment it touches, not the least of which will be the hands of the person handling the cable.
How to clean up cables
There are a few different schools of thought on cleaning cables.
- One is with a solvent or oil. Place a small amount of Lemon oil or orange oil on a old washcloth. This process takes longer and is more thorough leaving the cables looking well cared for and easier to handle over time. Using too much oil will become a mess, so start small and work the dirty areas of the cable first to determine the amount of oil necessary before soaking a cloth and beginning to commit yourself to a very long time of cleaning and then drying and excessively oiled cable.
- Another “Roadie” rule is to locate the dirty area(s) of the cables and then having done so, strip off several inches of quality gaff tape and use the sticky part of the gaff tape and tape over the affected area and then “rip” the gaff tape back off the cable and over a number of passes, you’ll find that the adhesive on the gaff tape is stronger than the goo left on the cable and it will adhere to the gaff tape. This process requires having gaff tape at your disposal and has been accused as being a “waste” of gaff tape by those who have not had to clean cables before. A quick object lesson in offering the complainant the opportunity to clean the cable “quickly” with an oil-based or solvent based cleaner and you’ll likely be left alone with permission to buy more gaff tape when needed.
It’s the electricians versus those audio guys who yell at anyone who wraps their audio cables around their arm, wrist to elbow (generally, the electricians and most all well-meaning volunteers). The theory to “good” cable storage and wrapping is to create a reverse or counter twist in the cable for each forward or standard twist used while it is being wrapped up. How many times have you seen a cable, electrical or audio or even rope that is laying across the ground with “loop-d-loops” running the span of the cable or rope? I see this all the time. Those loops are there because the cable was wrapped with a single directed twist each time a loop was created; in effect, each loop of that stored cord, cable or rope directly corresponds to the number of wraps or coils it was stored with.
If you have a big ‘ole coil of 100 feet of mic cable and the person who wound it did the regrettable “hand over the elbo” wrap, you will have the exact number of wrapping coils as you do the number of loops in the pile/coil. Make sense? I hope so.
Here’s how to "Figure 8" your cables and show your allegiance to the world of Media technologies!
If you are right handed, follow these instructions for 50’ cable lengths and less for mic cables, speaker cables and guitar or patch cables;
Ready: Lay out the cable to wrapped in a straight line (as straight a line as it can, anyway) so that as you wrap the cable, you’ll not be pulling up tangles and knots (those will come later when you don’t have the time to deal with them and MUST use the cable gnarled up in your hand)
1: Pick up one end of the cable or the other so that the connector is laying in the palm of your left hand and the cable is between your hand and your body, thus saying that the connector/end of the cable is “pointing” away from you.
2: With your right hand, reach down arm’s length and take hold of the cable to be wrapped and make a loop that rests in the semi-open palm of your left hand, with the looped cable resting to the right of the open-ended connector. The diameter radius of the cable loop should be approximately 12” to 15” across. [By creating this first loop, you have placed a deliberate counter-clockwise twist in the cable.
3: To prevent that cable from “remembering” that first twist, you need to wrap in a loop with a corresponding reverse twist, in effect, negating the twist preceding it as far as the cable is concerned.] If you look at picture 
3a, you’ll see the that the remaining cable which is coming up from the bottom of the picture, is actually on the inside of the loop you were creating. This will be done by twisting/rolling the cable being wrapped in an “over/under” manner which these pics should help you create. Look for the green circle to show you the resting cable position. 
4: This pic should show you the final wrap (of a pretty short cable for picture purposes) and its theoretical (minimal) cable positioning in your hand.
I'd like to think that I can do a much better job of demonstrating how to "Figure 8 " a cable than this, but for the time and my energy, this is as good as it gets at this point.
Better ideas? Helpful suggestions? Send them my way.
Wade,
ReplyDeletePlease cut yourself some slack. If anyone is allowed to have some self pity right now, it is you. You have always been my role model for compassion. I know how you feel regarding the finances. We can only do what we can do. Let it go. You have so much love for people, please keep some for yourself. Peace.