Making the Cable Besides the cable itself and two RJ-45 connectors it is best to have the relevant

tools for cutting the sleeving and crimping on the connectors. You will need a sharp stanley knife for trimming the sleeveing and a cable crimping tool to lock the connectors onto each end of the cable. The cables should have their sleeving trimmed back at each end by approximately 13mm in order to expose the wires for sorting. The wires should then be flattened out and sorted into the following order from left to right; White/Orange, Orange, White/Green, Blue, White/Blue, Green, White/Brown, Brown.

At this point it is best to make sure that the wires are the same length and trim them as necessary. Its a good idea to check the order of the wires before moving onto the next stage to make sure that orange and brown have not been mixed up as some white wires dont have their markings coloured clearly. Once the wires are confirmed to be in the correct order then it is time to attach the RJ-45 connectors. This is a simple case of pushing the wires in as far as they will go and then using a crimping tool to secure them into place.

Once one end is done simply repeat the process for the second end, after that be sure to test the cable with an appropriate device before using it in your network. RJ-45 connectors are the most common form of connectors used on UTP Cat5 cables. The RJ simply means Registered Jack and

the 45 designation specifies the pin numbering scheme. The cable itself contains 4 twisted pairs of wires making a total of 8 wires (Kerr, R, 1996).