The S4 really is a fickle beast to perfect cable management in, doubly so when using paracord...
I've been mostly happy with my work except for my SATA power cables. I've gone through several iterations of sleeving these things and they always seem a little off, but I think I've finally nailed it.
The old cables, complete with heatshrink and gaffers tape to keep everything together:
The biggest reason I wanted to redo the SATA cables was to get rid of the heatshrink. To achieve this, I'm using crimp connectors instead of the pass-through ones.
Unfortunately, the housing doesn't give much room for inserting the pin, meaning that I found it incredibly difficult to use the Lutro0 method of sleeving (melting the sleeve end over the pin) because the melted sleeving takes up too much space. Instead, I opted for the CableMod method, where you position the end of the sleeve slightly past the insulation, then crimp the end of the sleeving onto the bare wire:
There are a few disadvantages to this. One is that it's harder to do right since you can't really pre-crimp. Second is that the integrity of the crimp is not as good, since the pin bites into the sleeve rather than the insulation. Needless to say I needed to be a bit more careful with these cables.
Since making the cable was kind of a hassle, I didn't want to have to replace it every time HDPLEX came out with a better PSU, so I decided to design it around using an extension cable.
Now for the hardest part: Stuffing everything into the S4 Mini. This part kind of sketched me out and gave me quite a few blisters. I opted to shove most of the cable under my SSDs to hide the unsightly bits, which required a lot of brute force and an uncomfortable amount of rubbing paracord against my GPU, but the end result is worth it IMO.
I've been mostly happy with my work except for my SATA power cables. I've gone through several iterations of sleeving these things and they always seem a little off, but I think I've finally nailed it.
The old cables, complete with heatshrink and gaffers tape to keep everything together:
The biggest reason I wanted to redo the SATA cables was to get rid of the heatshrink. To achieve this, I'm using crimp connectors instead of the pass-through ones.
Unfortunately, the housing doesn't give much room for inserting the pin, meaning that I found it incredibly difficult to use the Lutro0 method of sleeving (melting the sleeve end over the pin) because the melted sleeving takes up too much space. Instead, I opted for the CableMod method, where you position the end of the sleeve slightly past the insulation, then crimp the end of the sleeving onto the bare wire:
There are a few disadvantages to this. One is that it's harder to do right since you can't really pre-crimp. Second is that the integrity of the crimp is not as good, since the pin bites into the sleeve rather than the insulation. Needless to say I needed to be a bit more careful with these cables.
Since making the cable was kind of a hassle, I didn't want to have to replace it every time HDPLEX came out with a better PSU, so I decided to design it around using an extension cable.
Now for the hardest part: Stuffing everything into the S4 Mini. This part kind of sketched me out and gave me quite a few blisters. I opted to shove most of the cable under my SSDs to hide the unsightly bits, which required a lot of brute force and an uncomfortable amount of rubbing paracord against my GPU, but the end result is worth it IMO.
