Absolutely, and I wasn’t ever arguing that our variable naming shouldn’t be consistent, but rather that not using the automated tool was stupid, unethical and prone to problems. It was so completely the typical consultant method of charging the client to do something by hand that should be done by machine, and it always bothered me when we did that on the spur of the moment, so I didn’t want to actually lay groundwork to facilitate that on a larger scale.
Somewhat OT: I post on another board where the most incendiary topic appears to be the minimum age at which children should have their own cell phone.
OK, the way to NOT roll them is to wind them around anything - your hand, your arm, anything like that.
Why?
Because each circuit around your arm or hand puts a 360 degree twist in the cable. As all but the shortest cables won’t be able to spin around to compensate for the 360 degree twist, the twist remains in the cable as it is rolled. That puts a huge amount of stress on the conductors inside of the cable, leading to breakage. Also, when you have to uncoil the cable, it will try to untwist and tangle up.
It is a HUGE pain in the ass and shortens the life of the cable.
The proper way to coil a cable is to form an overhand loop, followed by an underhand one. Basically, even numbered loops are one direction, odd numbered loops are flipped over. The flipping takes the twist back out.
Watch this video to see how NOT to and how to. Although the guy seems to be doing this overly deliberately to show how it’s done. A real road dog does this very quickly without even thinking about it. It’s a quick and easy way to tell the pros from the posers.
A properly coiled cable can be laid on the stage and can be dragged out and lay perfectly flat on the stage with no possibility of loops being formed that could trip up a performer.
This is even more important with microphone “snakes”, which are huge grey or black cables with 16 to 48 small, fragile wire pairs inside that costs more than a weeks wages. Break one of those and you’ll be fired…from a cannon.
Square knots kill people. Look, it’s a fact. I’m not talking about two half hitches, which is not a great knot but at least won’t kill you. Even if you tie them correctly (and let’s face it, most people screw it up and tie granny knots instead) they’re still far, far inferior to a sheet bend. What’s more, a sheet bend is actually quicker to tie! And yet instructors in this industry continue to teach this crap in schools. I hate it, I hate it a lot.
gaffa is correct, by the way. I’ve also seen something derisively called a “college” wrap done, which is superficially similar to the correct way, and is common among people with just enough knowledge to be dangerous. Instead of going overhand, underhand, overhand, underhand, as gaffa describes, they continuously do overhand loops. That’s better than going around the elbow, and much less damaging to the cable, but it’s still going to shorten the life of your cable a bit and you won’t be able to avoid some tangling upon uncoiling. Also, I believe gaffa is a sound tech, and the cables they work with are much, much more fragile than most lighting cables. I’m a lighting guy, and we’re much less fussy because our cables are not so easily damaged. Still, everything should be coiled the same, proper way, from the most fragile Triax and fiberoptic cables all the way up to the most durable rope.
Sure, we call it over/under. Microphone cables have a braided shield, think chinese fingercuffs, made of thin wire. This provides protection from em interference which is very important in audio. This shield completely surrounds the other two conductors.
A mic cable is round in cross section but think of it as two sided, inside and outside
Roll the cable around your hand and elbow over and over, if you go just one way you pull the outside braid and compress the inside, eventually the outside breaks from the stress and even worse breaks in the middle somewhere. This means it is difficult to repair if not impossible.
Got that? Ok
This part is hard to visualize, but I am going to try
If you are right handed, grab the male end of the cable in your left hand
With your right hand make make an 8 to 10 inch loop and lay it over into your left
Now slide down about half the length of the previous loop, .twist your wrist and pull the cable into your hand the reverse direction making the same size loop.
I hope that made sense, another way to think of it is as a figure 8 but in a single loop.
The whole point is that tension is balanced on both sides of the cable, it will lay straight and will usually break on the ends, an easy repair.
Why all the trouble? My mic cable costs .22 cents a foot and a pair of xlr ends about $6, my standard cable pack has appx 75 20’ 25 10’ and 12 50’.
We wrap this way, not only mic cables but power, speaker really all cables for similar reasons.
I do this to my garden hose as well
Hope that helps, maybe Gaffa can make it clearer
Capt
Ninja’d by others who are much better explainers than I
Capt Kirk I wind cables by making a figure-8 over my hand and elbow…is that considered acceptable? I have very long arms, so this gives pretty big 8s.
And the reason is exactly as you explain. If you wind it in Os instead of 8s you are twisting it.
That will work OK if you are in a studio and are hanging the cables from hooks, but if you’re on the road figure-8 coiled cables are a lot more bulky. And I have a difficult time imagining that figure-8 coils will pay out as well as the technique we use.
The method Capt Kirk, appleciders and I described can produce coils of any size needed - I coil my 100’ microphone cables to one diameter and my 25’ cables to a smaller diameter so they fit inside of the longer ones (I’m the tiniest bit anal. You can tell, can’t you?)
It is the same basic effect but I would murder you if you rolled my stage 
You are free to roll your cables any way you wish
Capt
I do photography for a living. The truth is, I don’t really know people except for amateur pixel-peeper types to argue about Canon vs. Nikon. I shoot both, although I am back to being all Nikon this year after flirting with Canon. (I would shoot with a Canon 5D and a Nikon D3 on assignments. If it weren’t for that D3 coming out and Nikon catching up and surpassing Canon on low light performance, I would have become a Canon shooter.)
They’re both great systems. I would say if videography is your focus, the Canon system is probably better for you. If you’re shooting stills, Nikon has a slight edge. But that’s at the high, high end. For consumer level cameras, it makes no difference. Find the camera that you like and you feel most comfortable with.
Oh yeah, and single space all the way, or something that is slightly larger than a single space, but not a double space. I hate text that has two spaces between sentences. Drives me batty.
Yep. On tour, I coiled my 200’ cables on the floor, carefully twisting them to make the same over/under pattern without having it lift the entire 75+ pound cable in one hand to continue the over/under. It doesn’t make as tight a coil (and with that heavy, heavy cable, it doesn’t matter much) but it’s the principle of the thing.
[I hope this doesn’t become a holy bloody argument]
Common method:
- Extend your left arm in front of you, with your thumb pointing forward and your fingers pointing to the right, slightly curled but not spread apart
- Gently lay the end of your cable on top of your fingers with the connector pointing toward you and the tail (the length of the cable) extending out past your forefinger and onto the stage/floor/whatever away from you.
- Reach forward and grasp the cable (tail) between one or two fingers at the tips and your thumb right atop the line of your first joint.
- Simultaneously…
A) Move your right hand back toward you, up, then forward over our left hand
B) Twist your right wrist counterclockwise so the palm faces to your right
C) Slide your thumb and fingers in opposite directions. This will roll the cable across your fingertips and you should end up with the cable pinched between your thumb at the tip and the fingers near the line of their first joints. - Open your fingers and let the cable drop. The tail should once again extend past your left forefinger and onto the stage/floor/whatever away from you.
- Repeat steps 3, 4, and 5 until you reach the end of the cable.
The point is to make the cable do a full twist* as you wind it a full turn around your hand, one-for-one. The argument against the palm & elbow wind is that it fails to include the twist and therefore strains the metal wiring inside as your winding action creates a reverse-twist, relatively speaking.** With cables that are wound and unwound on a weekly basis year after year after year, this can have a tremendous effect on the life of your cable. With household extension cords, it’s a good practice to follow but there is typically not enough repetitive wear-and-tear on it to make a noticeable difference.
Better method:
Imagine your cable is like a special tape measure. Rather than winding your cable around in a circular motion with rolling action (which is essentially like scooping it up in bights and dumping it on your other hand), twist your storage device so it takes up cable while allowing it to remain untwisted. Cord reels do this well (and there are even spring-loaded versions that will do most of the work for you) and also help in managing the safe un-winding of your cable during set-ups.
*My buddy in high school told me “it should make a quarter-twist as you wind it” then cursed me for mangling the cable when I followed his instruction. I told him he needed to learn better math, better geometry, or better English [preferably all of the above], then showed him how and why it needed to be a full twist for each full circle.
**The counter argument is that, while the method works with short lengths of cable, it is actually counterproductive for long cables because you introduce a twist near your hand which doesn’t carry out onto the cable beyond a few feet. Therefore this method imposes a stressful counter-twist on the remaining cable – at least until the cable is short enough that your hand-twisting action can ‘transmit’ down the line.
–G!
You’ve got me
All Wound Up
An’ ready to go!
…–Robin Zander (Cheap Trick)
…All Wound Up
…Lap of Luxury
I do video these days, a seven camera concert shoot that I fit into a backpack.
I’m dead serious. Here it is with the outer flap open showing the pockets for all the cables and fully open showing the main compartment where I have all the tripods. The upper compartment has my main camera case which is wonderfully compact and rugged and two smaller cases for the mixer, quad-split, power supplies, clamps and six smaller cameras.
Properly coiled cables are *absolutely vital.
*
The whole case weighs slightly less than a 200’ coil of lighting cable.
What drives me bats is how my husband winds up extension cords, LAN cables, etc. The last foot or two get wrapped around the coiled cable, which results in a semi-tidy donut of wire with that last part getting as curly and kinky as an old telephone cord.
I often say that I learn the most unusual things on this board.
I had no idea that rolling cables had so many issues.
Thanks for explaining it, everyone. Yet another piece of knowledge gleaned from the Dope.
He needssome of these. Using the end of the cable to tie a knot is a very bad idea.
I’m so re-coiling my too-dang-long extension cord now that I know how to do it. Any suggestions for how to get the preexisting twists out of a cord, or is it too late?
I think I love you.
I am glad that others were able to explain it better than I. Upon re-reading my post, I think only those who know would understand what I wrote. Proper care of cabling is the first thing you learn in Audio 101 and you would be amazed how expensive cables can be for instance, for our power distro the cable is appx $2 per foot and we have 200 feet of it. That doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that we have to make 5 runs of it ground, neutral and three hots plus twenty dollar connectors on each end. You bet we take care of it. Socopex is a common lighting cable has 19 12ga conductors(usually) that connects 6 luminaires to a dimmer rack, those racks often control 96 fixtures so 16 runs of Soco, at least 32 expensive connectors, plus break outs on the stage end. Some of the big boy dimmer racks will draw up to 600 amps of three phase power and require two neutrals so six conductors of huge cable. The expense can be mind boggling, so we take care of all of it.
Sorry at this point I am blathering
Capt
It can be done, first lay it out as straight as it will lay in a sunny spot on a warm day, let the jacket get soft.
Second, wrap it properly as well as you can
Third, repeat step two until it remembers to wrap properly, seriously cables develop a memory and “want” to wrap like you train them to. It gets easier with repetition for you and the cable, trust me on this.
Capt
The difference is that on a PC, you can use any controller you like up to and including uber-gamer warped keyboards with fifty macro keys, OR a joystick, OR a console gamepad.
On a console, you can use… a console gamepad.
Nothing else matters to me - convenience, power, selection, etc. yadda yadda. I don’t like being limited to five button mashy-mash control, and console-format games bore the pants off me even on my PC.