 One of the most time-consuming parts of a new build can be sleeving and it's particularly time-consuming if your cat's constantly getting in the way because they love they love this stuff. See? Very bothersome. So let's have a look at some of the supplies needed some of the decisions that I had to make with respect to how I want to get down to how I want to go about this. Right now there's sort of two main ways to sleeve cables. There's this way which is you do your heat shrink, you do your zip tie at the end, and then you have the wires exposed at the end. And then the other way that's sort of the more enthusiast guys are going about, this is pretty in fashion these days, is the individually sleeved wires which is both a lot of work but both a lot of work and a lot of good looks. So you just got to decide whether you want to do that. You can buy these pre-done extensions but extensions have some ill effects such as you lose a little bit of efficiency in the connectors and you lose a little bit of efficiency in the longer cables. So and then also okay like the last ill effect is that now your cable is longer so you have the original cable which looks something like this. Here we go the original cable which looks something like this which is now even longer so you have to bunch up that extra somewhere so it becomes a little bit harder to hide. So those are sort of the pros and cons of using these. They look good though they're not a lot of work and they're not very expensive compared to doing it yourself. I decided just because I'm lazy and I had this particular sleeving lying around and the matching heat shrink tubing. So sleeving heat shrink tubing, scissors, tape, marker, razor blade, something to mark the lengths for your heat shrink, ATX. So this is for 24 pins. Yeah I'm just gonna see if I can get to focus so you guys can see what this tool looks like. 24 pins, 6 pins, and 8 pins and then this guy is for Molex's female and male on the two respective sides. Freaking cats here again go away. Okay so the route I decided to go is actually slightly different. I have some challenges that I'm probably gonna face here because one of them is that I have more than 24 pins on the side of the power supply and 24 pins here so I haven't stripped the sleeving off of it yet. I don't know exactly what they're doing but you can see that some of these have here like this one for example have two pins going into one motherboard pin. So I'm gonna have to figure out where exactly they're coming from because what I'm going to be doing because I'm not quite willing to put the work in for individually sleeved but I don't I don't like having the exposed bits at the end is I'm using a slightly thicker sleeving and I am doing two wires per cable sleeve. So right now you can see I've got my modular, here we go, my modular 6 plus 2. Where's the 2? Sorry I can hardly reach with my chest tripod on here. So I've got my modular 6 plus 2 and I've done two wires. Focus please. Yep so two wires per sleeve which means that even if I bend it like this you can't see much of the actual wire at all even if the wire color is yellow. See I've been this all that way so you can only see about that much of it but what I'll probably do when I'm routing the cables out of the video card itself so I'll have it going in like this so I'll have a nice loose curve on it so that you can't really see it too much. So this guide will be more of a lazy man's way of doing it if you want the OCD way to do this and I mean OCD in like the kindest most respectful possible sense because it really does get fantastic results. You should check out this thread on Hardforum and there we go 1599965 and this is by Ka Master and he basically shows you guys how to do it sort of by the book and end up with the best possible results. My way is going to be fairly straightforward compared to that so let's get started. Actually one more side note before we get started. Sleeving of course isn't only useful for the cables on your power supply. In this case these are some custom fabricated things that I did. So these are just extension cables for one fan power connector to dual fan power connectors and I did some sort of messy soldering and taping and isolating or insulating rather isolating insulating here and then I can take the whole thing zip tie it heat shrink it and then it sort of hides it and makes it not look quite as ugly so that's one thing you can use it for. Other cables as well so I haven't decided how I'm gonna go about this but what I'm probably gonna do is butcher these four adapters so I have four of these molex to dual SATA with black cable adapters. I'm gonna hack them apart and then I'm gonna use these to wire up my drives on the back of the motherboard tray when I'm done here just because I'm having a heck of a time tracking down the any kind of part number that I can use to fabricate these myself so I'm just gonna play the hack it up game. So yeah so we're gonna do the 8-pin connector so this is the motherboard connector CPU and go step by step here on that one. Step one is to remove the existing sleeving you can use either razor blade or scissors for this depending on how how tightly how tightly packed the wires are in there so you want to be careful if you're using a razor blade not to accidentally cut any of the wires because remaking these cables is a heck of a lot more work than sleeving them which is already more work than most people are willing to put into their PCs and you just want to double check make sure you didn't cut anything it's good this is just glue residue leftover from the adhesive heat shrink that was used on this cable before so be careful when you're cutting up the existing braided sleeving because if you cut it if you cross cut it then what you'll do is you'll make a real mess like if you cut across an area that you've already cut because little tiny bits of this plastic will get all over the place and make just just a horrifying mess and if you're the kind of person who cleans your own house as opposed to has your mom doing it for you then that'll be an issue that'll be a factor believe me I know the demographics of my YouTube channel I know most of you are young although some of you aren't do you know that it's 96% male who watched this channel go figure right guys so I'm just I'll remove this other end off for this next part an optional step would be numbering the pins before you start taking them out but in a lot of cases it doesn't even really matter because as long as you follow a schematic for whatever connector you happen to be putting back together then yeah it doesn't really make a difference as long as the voltages are right so here we go actually although although bearing that in mind on the 24 pin I'm probably going to go ahead and number them especially for the ones where there are two wires going into one connector so for some reason XFX or mostly sonic rather has seen fit to do it that way so I'm gonna go ahead and stick with their way just for peace of mind so there you go and then the next thing we do here is we use this tool use this tool and not any other tool don't use the one that looks like this it's round but has like two prongs on the end because you're probably pretty much wasting your time although I'm not gonna do a separate guide I will show you guys how the mole X removal tool or like the peripheral removal tool works you put this in here there's different sides for female and male and then what you're doing is I'm gonna see if I can get the camera focus yep there you go see you are compressing these two pins on either side and don't leave the sleeping cat you're compressing these two pins on either side so that what happens is once you cover them you can pull them out of the housing right here so you just go like that yeah and then you pull out the wire I can't really do it because the sleevings in the way you guys catch my drift so this one works much the same way except that these are much more finicky problematic connector so you're gonna make sure that when you're looking at the safety latch these are sort of side to side the pins go in the sides this way not like sides this way because that's where the little the little pins are and then just gotta get it just right there we go make sure you're down the outside okay and then what I do is I usually use my palm to apply some pressure to the to this in here making sure not to apply any sideways pressure because these pins can break off so I'm applying pressure here then I take the cable the wire I apply pressure in towards the the removal tool then I give it a little bit of a wiggle to loosen the pins make sure that they're both caught and then pull out so you go tools extracted and you guys can see here now the little tiny pins that it's very important want to see if I can get that twisted for you so you can see the little tiny pins on either side that it's important not to ruin and you never want to force it when you're doing this guys because if you force it what can happen is you can accidentally bend the pins completely are the little clips the little hooks completely backwards and if you do that then you basically have to cut this off by some of these pins crimp it on fabric fabricated completely new connector so try not to do that it's a real it's a real bear to deal with so you go it takes about that long once you have some practice and then the next step for the next step I take whatever cables I'm going to be running through the sleeving so I've now removed all of the ends here and then I just put a little bit of tape on them like painters green tape is what I'm using right now just because it comes off really easily so this just keeps it from catching when I run it through the sleeving that I'm going to be running it through so if you have a whole group of wires that you're doing then you'll obviously run those through if you're doing individual wires then you'll obviously be doing these one at a time but I'm doing two wires at a time so you just kind of go like this until you get to the other end where I haven't removed the connector because I don't really need to personally I find it kind of tricky to measure these out before I put them on so I just go to the end cut them you'll need oh that was one of the things I didn't mention before you'll need lighter or I use a little torch to keep the ends from fraying so you just give it a little little bit of heat not a ton you don't want them to start melting too bad but just enough to keep them from completely coming apart so now I have put the sleeving on and sizing it is a little bit tricky so for the heat shrink what you want to do is you take your your mark whatever it happens to be in my case it's a Q connector and then you line it up make a little mark use a pair of sharp scissors to cut right on the mark there are ways to do this more accurately than what I'm doing but like I said mine is the quick and dirty guide and then you put that on there making sure that you don't accidentally bend back any of the strands while you're doing this because you'll un-braid it and make a mess so go ahead put that down to the end now lots of different ways to terminate these so what I used to usually do was I'd use a bigger heat shrink and I'd put a zip tie under it to make sure that it wouldn't move but that was usually when I was trying to fit the the sleeving really really tight and have it be as compressed as possible because the more here so the more tight it is the more opaque it is and the more loose it is the more you can see through it you guys can see my finger so I was usually trying to go for that whereas I'm using a higher quality braided sleeving this time so what I'm gonna be doing is going for a more loose fit so you guys can see my connector that I'm already finished so this guy right here and at the power supply ends I'm not really as worried about how tidy it is so I'm leaving a little bit of extra extra braided sleeving outside of the heat shrink and what that means is that even if the heat shrink accidentally moves a little bit it won't actually come out completely which is very very pretty much impossible to fix whereas on the other end I've gone for the pretty tidy approach okay so where was I here right so you want to get it kind of almost to the end there and then yeah I guess you can pretty much heat shrink it out so I use a torch for this it's better to use a heat gun with a like a fairly low setting but you just kind of give it a little bit of heat try not to melt the connector or especially try not to melt the the braided sleeving because that's really really bad then you basically just wasted that piece because it'll be too short for anything else so once that's done you go ahead make sure the orientation of the wires within this leading stays correct okay and then you come back to the other end here and what I usually do is sort of approximately mark I can feel where the pin ends and it's going to be a little bit under there then I just kind of burn through it get the get the pins out take off my masking tape like I said it's totally the lazy way I'm not doing it by the book but I showed you guys how to do it by the book as well basically follow that guide by someone more skilled and more patient than me and then what I do is I let the I loosen up the the cable sleeving a little bit just because I'm not going for like a super tight fit I just don't want it to move and then that gives me some idea of where I stand so now I can see that I have to cut away just a tiny bit more and make sure these two wires are are the same here oh okay that's interesting actually I might not need to cut away much more at all don't want to be too tight yeah just a little bit more so what I'll do is I'll quickly burn it and then while it's still hot just so that I don't end up with like globs at the end burn it mush it just to get rid of a little bit more I don't like cutting it with the scissors at this point because if you cut a little bit too much then what will happen is you will be stuck sorry let me just cut that bit off you'll be stuck because you'll then have to burn it a little bit and then once you burn it a little bit after you've cut it a bit too much then you can end up with like you know a big mess of like globby bits at the end which you then have to cut off and then all of a sudden you've gone too far and that's problematic so just kind of trimming this back keep on doing this being sure not to burn away the this the jacket on the wires mush mush mush okay should be good okay so now what we do is and this is critical this is a very important step make sure you put on your other piece of heat shrink wrap mark and cut okay so I put that on because if you forget to do this and you reattach the connector then you have to take them off again and that sucks so once you put on your heat shrink check your cat out of the way and then you find the connector which I have seemed to have misplaced you check either another connector you check a schematic online or you label them in the first place so here I got my two CPU connectors so it looks like black ones go at the top which ones are these so I'm doing these to correspond pretty much directly so I'm gonna take this I'm gonna turn it around and I'm gonna go okay well then these ones go right about here making sure the orientation of the wires is correct before I try to put them in clip and clip and then I make sure my heat shrink tubing completely covers the sleeving this time make sure it's not too loose or too tight yeah and then I go ahead and the old heat really careful with the heat if you guys are using an open flame for this part because it's very easy to accidentally melt this and then it'll start to fray and then you made a real mess of everything so there you go I have now sleeved my two wires that is pretty much how to do cable sleeving I don't know if I'm missing anything in particular so thank you for checking out my little guide and I'm sorry it was