Supersized Wiring Staples!

[frederic]

After I designed the layout of my studio, and built it all out, the time comes to start the wiring. I had peeked into the eaves of the house behind the short wall, behind the console table. The floor joists to lengthwise to the room, which is good. As I started channelling into the garage's ceiling below the studio, I quickly discovered only the eave's joists go in that direction - the main joists go across the width of the studio. So that means I can either drill 20 1" holes through the middle of the joists, and seriously weaken them, or run the snake cable on the surface of the garage ceiling. I decided to do the latter, even though I think it will ultimately be ugly.

Anyway... here is how I decided to do it. I welded together 10" wide, 2" tall "staples" using square tubing. Then screwed them into the joists, right through the plaster ceiling.

Homemade, supersized staples:

After dicking around with the ceiling trying to find a joist, I finally found one and installed the first "staple":

I made enough staples to go from the front hole, to the back hole in the ceiling, with the assumption that the joists are on the "normal" 16" centers. Sure enough, that was not the case, and the 2x16" joists (and they are really 2"x16" too, not like modern lumber which is always short) are on 11" centers. Not 12" centers, 11" centers:

So tomorrow, assuming the weather holds out, I have to make seven more "Staples" and attach them to the ceiling.

I've already cut enough 31' sections of 24-ch snake cable off the spool so once the last staple is installed I can start feeding the cable through. I've also bundled two cat 5's, two RS232, one 50 ohm coax ethernet cable for the "Akainet" function of my recorders, as well as a 75 ohm CATV coax for passing wordclock to the producer's desk. I bundled all the non-snake cable together using electrical tape spaced 16", and it's slightly narrower than the snake cable so everything should fit in my staples with room to spare.

Once that's done, I can continue soldering. I've already hacked up some additional snake cable to make the cross-connects from the various pieces of gear on the console table to the doghouse, I just have to buy and solder on TRS plugs. Xstatic gave me a fantastic price on authentic Switchcraft TRS plugs which were only slightly more expensive than the generic copies I was going to have made, but I'm still undecided what to do. Quality speaks volumes to me, yet I'm a cheap SOB. Hmmmmm. Anyway, TY Xstatic for a tremendously awesome price. I'll keep you posted. I'd have made a decision already except I'm terribly undercaffienated and can barely sit up. I've been up since 3am since my son decided to scream at the top of his lungs, which is unusual actually.

 

[Track Rat]

Very cool sir. I have used 6" bridle rings for just about the same task. Of course I get them free from work so that's what drove that decision.

 

[frederic]

I have the ortronics equivilent, but I wanted to have the cables next to each other, as close to the ceiling as possible, so in theory should I ever clean out the garage, I can drive my truck in so I can work on it should it be snowing or raining.

Having the bottom of the cable hangers I made no more than 1.95" from the ceiling makes a world of difference. That means with the cab lights, I could jack my truck 4" off the ground, which is just enough to get the tires, spindles, and some of the suspension off.

The outdoor light that someone slapped up there as a garage light has to go as well. I have an amazingly shallow pair of flourescents, that are 1.75" thick. Though my concern is of course... audio snake cable running 2' from the new fixtures... so I'll try it and see how that turns out. It would be very rare however that the garage lights would be on while I'm laying down tracks, so maybe it will work out in that sense.


I finished making the rest of the "staples" today, and maybe later in the afternoon I'll have the time to climb over all the junk in the garage and hang them.

 

[frederic]

Whew. All the staples are done. As you can see I've curved their direction smoothly from the front of the garage to the back of the garage, around the lamp so there is some decent space between the lamp and the cabling.


Tomorrow, I start the fun of snaking (pun intended) the various cables that have to go across these hangers.

10 - 24 channel TRS snake cable
4 - cat 5 ethernet cables
1 - cat 5 rs422 machine control cable
1 - 50 ohm coax "Akainet" cable
1 - 75 ohm coax wordclock cable
1 - 75 ohm coax ntsc cable
4 - 10 ga speaker wire pairs

And a boatload of wire ties!!

 

[DDev]

Just make sure you don't forget to label everything BEFORE snaking it

I'm sure, with your experience, you've "been there, done that" but sometimes you never know.....

Can't wait to see pics of you having fun with all those connectors at the termination points. Such fun!!!

Darryl.....

 

[DDev]

I should have given you my recent snaking story, so here goes.

We are in the implemenation phase of adding in-ear monitoring to our church sound system. We went with the Aviom system for flexibility reasons, and we had to figure out how to get a CAT 5 cable from our sound booth to our stage. The straight line distance between the 2 is about 80 feet but there is no straight line path between them. All the flooring and walls in our sanctuary are poured concrete, and during our first attempt to do this we discovered that the only conduits from the audio side of our booth were both too full to pull anything through (and there was no pull wire, to boot!!). So, we re-grouped and tried to figure it all out. We learned that the audio conduits from the booth went down through the floor into a breakout box, then took a 90 degree turn before going subterranean in the concrete. The conduit from there travelled about 100 feet to another set of junction boxes that are up in our amp room on the third story (so there had to be at least 2 more 90 degree bends to go through). So, we decided to abandon that path entirely and look for something else. We thought about going up into the catwalk but we couldn't get out of the booth without either installing a conduit vertically from the booth to the ceiling (which was shot down for aesthetic reasons) or by cutting a small groove in the concrete landing behind the booth all the way to the back wall, then feeding the CAT 5 cable up through the 2" rigid fiberglass acoustic panels on the back wall.

Well, before doing the latter of those, we decided to see first how we would actually get from the amp room (where all conduits seemed to go) to the stage to make sure we could actually get on stage through existing conduit. After several failed attempts at finding the right conduit we finally managed to locate one that came out behind a blank panel we had never noticed before in the wall behind the stage. OK, so now we have a path to the stage. During this process, however, we had discovered another empty line that we didn't know where it went so we fed a steel electricians pull tape through it and found that it was clanging somewhere near our video production room, which is accessible via another route from the sound booth.

(Have I mentioned yet that our "as built" drawings have absolutely nothing to do with our facility? Sucks big time!!)

So, we start poking around and finally found the ONE conduit in the whole system that actually had a pull wire installed in the video room. We eventually found the opposite end of the pull wire above a ceiling panel in the prep room behind the stage. Now we think we have a plan.

With 3 of us working this, we managed to string slightly over 400 feet of CAT 5 cable down through the floor of the sound booth, through a junction box and a 90 degree turn, to the ceiling of the video room where the conduit just ended in open air, with a loose cable run through 15 feet of ceiling, down the wall to the conduit with the pull wire, all the way back across the sanctuary to the ceiling of the backstage prep room where the conduit again ended in open air, routed to another open air conduit back up to the thrid story by the amp room where it made a 180 degree turn into the conduit that feeds the stage. 16 manhours to find the route, 30 minutes to pull it and terminate it, and now we're in business!!

This weekend will be our inagural flight with the system. It has all been checked out and works great. Now I just have to teach everyone how to do their own monitor mixes. Piece of cake!!

Darryl.....

 

[frederic]

Here is a lame digital-camera captured "360" (2.5mb):

http://frederic.midimonkey.com/studio/IM001423.AVI

Just make sure you don't forget to label everything BEFORE snaking it

Of course. Already marked the labels, and cut the cables. Just have to affix labels to cabling and snake it through.

Can't wait to see pics of you having fun with all those connectors at the termination points. Such fun!!!

Yeah, fun. LMAO. It will be fun once it's done.

The good news is, I bought the very last piece of gear that I *need* to complete the studio. Of course there is gear I want, think I'd like and so forth, but the *need* list is completed. I even have all the cabling for it ready to go. So to have a funny functional "pro" home studio, I just have to snake the cable, solder it to the patch bays, and make a ton more TRS patch cords.

Oh, and hang four small pieces of moulding (which I painted this morning and are drying in the basement), and install two outlet covers, and power up the electrical for the new fixture above the stairwell.

And clean all the crap on the floor out of here, and clean the floor really good so my son can crawl around.

I cannot find words for the excitement I'm experiencing... to be truly almost done.

 

[frederic]

I've done wiring in old churches before, and ran into the brick, morter and concrete issues. I got around this by installing chair rail moulding which I've routed out some space behind, on top of two narrow hardwood strips to match the chair rail moulding. In one particular job, it gave me enough space to run two 20A circuits down one side of the sanctuary to the back-end, above congregation organ balcony, and on the other side I was able to run about 12 thin TRS audio cables to the alter, for microphones and other such things.

Was very tight, and I used a ton of structural adhesive since products like Liquid Nails didn't exist then.

 

[DDev]

Cool video but it would have been less dizzy if you had moved around a wee bit slower That's probably how I should image my studio since it is too small to get decent pictures with a camera.

As far as our church goes, it is almost brand new. We just moved in 2 1/2 years ago. We are right on the lower edge of what they term "mega" churches, with a sanctuary that seats 1300 or so and an average weekend attendance of close to 3000. With a new facility I would have expected better planning for eventual upgrades, but they don't exist except in my head.

Which is why I just made the decision to ditch my career and go to work for the church as Director of Technical Ministries. That means that I get to play around with installed audio, video, and lighting systems all the time (as opposed to just designing them for aircraft which is what I currently do for a living). One of my early projects is going to be integrating an audio production studio, so I'm sure I'll be hitting the board with questions and visions when that time comes.

Cheers,
Darryl.....

 

[frederic]

Well, if I moved slower, the camera wouldn't have caught the entire 360. It's a digital camera, not a video camera, so it has a time limitation of about 10 seconds more or less. So, I got dizzy filming it. I'll do something a little nicer once I have the time...

Cool new career! I'd really enjoy something like that, however I am too greedy and fairly agnostic when it comes to religion. I'm generally religious just before "impact" and that's about it

Anyway, changing of the guards just occured, so my wife has my son and I'm about to spend the rest of the afternoon/evening in the freezing crawl space, slapping down wire trusses, insulation, and wiring up the electrical outlet to power the 100/1000mb ethernet switch so I don't have to keep this ugly extension cord going through the hole behind the doghouse.

I hate crap on the floor!

 

[frederic]

In the crawl space, I installed an outlet so i can plug in a worklight as necessary, as well as a permanent home for the ethernet switch's wall wart:

Wire run! I know these pictures are the most exciting thing you've seen today. But do know I did this "live" without getting hurt.

Looks like it's time to start snaking the ethernet cable through followed by the snake cable. Nice to make progress once in a while.

 

[frederic]

Ethernet/RS422 cabling

Made the "snake" of ethernet and RS422 machine control cable today, and have it ready to be snaked through the hangers I made earlier. While I pull this through, I'll also be bundling in the two coax cables.

Before (nasty pile of crap, huh?):

After:

Had I put more thought into this, instead of running the five cat-5 cables as a bundle, I'd have realized that for the same diameter of these five cables, I could have run one 50-pair cable that's cat 5 certified, and have more than double the conductors in the same space. But oh well, I can't imagine needing 100 conductors, and I have an endless supply of cat-5, so I went with the less efficient, more aggrevating route for the purposes of getting this done.

Tomorrow, I snake this. I'd do it now but the garage lights burned out and I don't feel like climbing over boxes of junk with a flashlight in my mouth. Call me lazy.

 

[frederic]

The wiring continues... though slowly.

I mounted the non-audio junction block on the inside of the producer's desk, where all of the cable will be drawn to. The audio cabling goes to professional solder-type patch bays in the racks, and the non-audio goes to this block here:

And here is what it looks like with the wires run. Have tons or room for additional jacks, should the need ever arise. The leftmost six jacks are four ethernet, one rs422, and one open, the next six jacks are for speakers (RCA jacks) with two spares, the next six are totally available, and the last six will be things using coax cable. The bottom two BNC jacks are installed, and the left one is Wordclock and the right one is "Akainet".

The sad thing is to get to this point took three trips to stores, wasting a ton of time, and of course all the cable had to be wrapped every foot or so in electrical tape again as I left the cable outside in the garage overnight and the taping I did last night froze and fell off. I don't care if the tape stays, just as long as it's taped for the snaking part of the job. After that, it can fall off at will, fine with me.

 

[punkin]

Home made cable tray...cool! But something tells me you were just looking for another excuse to break out the welder again

Nice...I'm a neat freak when it comes to cable management.

 

[frederic]

Home made cable tray...cool! But something tells me you were just looking for another excuse to break out the welder again

Nice...I'm a neat freak when it comes to cable management.

I priced out commercially available cabling systems, and they were grossly expensive. Nice stuff of course, but I'm not going to spend $1000 on a cable management system when something this ugly will do the trick. The plan is after the cabling is installed, I'm going to form small-hole chicken wire of the staples, and plaster over it with as similar texture as I can to the original ceiling. This way, it looks intentional, and the cables are protected from rakes and other things being banged around in the garage space below it. I just wanted to run the cabling first, as it's easier when you have access between the staples, then plaster.

Plastering over it was the selling point to my wife... of course that's the last step, so I get to listen to her asking "Is it done yet?" for the next year LMAO. Which is fair, I tend to do the finish work looooooooong after I do the important stuff.

 

[punkin]

I know what you mean...I bought a couple Chatsworth 19" relay racks and isolation kits last week that practically broke the bank.

I get the picture now...a boxed in cable trough will be way cool and will serve to protect the cables even a bit more from the rouge laddar or angle iron being carried through the garage

 

[frederic]

I get the picture now...a boxed in cable trough will be way cool and will serve to protect the cables even a bit more from the rouge laddar or angle iron being carried through the garage

Exactly. Though the garage bay that the cable will be slung through, is my wife's garage bay once I clean all my car crap outta there. See, I'm only allowed one garage bay which I made into a "machine shop", except now I have no room for materials for said machine shop. So, I filled her bay up.

And she's not fond of the eight glass panes either - which are 12'x3' and an inch thick. Corporate building glass!

 

[vangore]

20 one inch holes wouldnt weaken the joists provided they were in the middle and not at the edge, we do that all the time at my work for pipes and wires