TuneTracker™ QuickTip

Putting the clamp on the cable mess

If you're a broadcaster, you're likely up to your ears in cables and cords, and the back of your broadcast console looks like a bird's nest. Over the years, we've tried a number of things to try and bring some semblance of order to the cable chaos, including:

• Twist ties, like they use on bags of bread (they work, but if you need to remove a cable from the bundle, you have to untwist all of them all along the way along, which is a royal pain)
  
  
• Zip ties (they work fine if you never plan on changing the cables in the bundle, which rules them out for most situations)
  
  
• Velcro wraps (if you buy the real deal, they're kind of expensive, plus they are always longer than you need and kind of cumbersome to work with)
  
  

We've thought, "if only there was something spring-loaded that nicely fit the size and shape of the cable bundle." The other day, the answer came to us. Hair clips! You know, those girlie things...those little clamps they use to hold hair in different places/positions? We got some of them and they work great. They're cheap, they grip and hold in place perfectly, and best of all, if you need to redo your cable bundle, they come off with just a pinch.

The ones shown in the illustration are about 3/4″ wide and an inch long. You can put quite a few cables in them, many more than shown here, because they spread out wide. Yet they come together tightly enough to hold even two or three cables together. And no, you aren't stuck with pink plastic and glitter. You can get plain brown or black ones that don't look like you borrowed them from your 10 year old daughter.

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