When I broke a mounting lug on the rear fan when I installed it temporarily so I could glue the aluminum plate on so I could lay out the acoustic foam on the rear panel, I had though I had had one more fan I had bought for a spare but I didn't see it anywhere. Late last night, I saw the darned thing right where I had though it was supposed to be, setting right in plain view. I swear, I need to get new glasses or check into the funny farm. Before resuming work on the cable I had been working on, I installed the fan and the grill on the back of the case. No problems this time since the foam cushioned the surface unevenness that caused the first fan to break.
I put in another six hours on that miserable, misbegotten, no good for nothing, cotton pickin', stinkin', rotten, lousy, stupid cable. Seems if anything could go wrong, it did (curse Murphy and his stupid law anyway). The part that gave me the most fits was trying to crimp the pins onto the wires at the PSU end of the cable. I just couldn't get a good bite on the insulation. Why, I don't know since these were pins left over from the cables I made for my current rig and the wire was the same wire and I didn't have any trouble then. I finally gave up and just crimped both crimps to the wire itself. I'm seriously considering making another Ace Hardware run and getting a spool of #16 AWG for the remaining cables instead of using the #14 AWG I've been using.
All but one of the punch down connectors I used for the cable were cannibalized from unused cables from my two old HX750 PSUs. The caps on those are made in a way that will accommodate larger wires better than most other styles. However, the last connector on the string had to have a terminal type cap and the connectors I cannibalized only had inline type clamps so I used a connector I had left over from when I modded my present case. Since those did such a poor job of accommodating the large wire, I made some notches in the cap to make more room for the wire insulation.
I'll spare you any more of the gory details of the problems I had making this cable and just show it to you.
Here it is inside the case viewed from the left side. The arrows point to what can be seen of the cable from this side. I hadn't "painted" the heat shrink sleeves with a felt pen yet (although the previous picture shows them already being "painted").
The next two shots show the cable from the right side.
Before installing the cable from hell for the final time, I tested it with my PSU tester and it had a short. (CENSORED)! I had checked for shorts when I finished with the first six connectors I installed so the short had to be in the next three. I popped the caps off those three and took my DVOM to them to determine which pair of wires were shorted. Then I spent 15-20 minutes with a flashlight and a magnifier trying to find the stupid short. It was a tiny broken strand that was bridging two wires buried where it was almost impossible to see it, let alone get to it to remove it. I was able to get it out (eventually, after some more of the colorful dialogue I'd been using while working on this "thing") and recapped the three connectors. When I reconnected it to the PSU tester, everything was fine.
Besides being low on supplies for making cables (I "killed" four punch down connectors and 10 pins), I need to take a break from this project to cool down since, right now, I'm madder than a cat getting a bath. At least the hardest cable of the bunch is done. Hopefully, some of the stuff I need will come in on Tuesday.
Did it fly? 
) been there a while.
I'm off (have been for years) to order them.
