Cat 5. Best tools, hint and tips if you'd be so kind.

[davesparks]

Hi Pirate - really like the look of the Kleine pass thru tool and ends not used efore, I feel it may prompt a purchase soon! I would guess very useful and quick method especially with pass thru faceplates/patch panels.

The Klein tool is very well made, very robust, and so easy to use with the Pass-thru system...you can untwist a good length, put the wires right through, easily check they are correctly aligned then pull the excess through so the twisted section sits hard against the "stop" before crimping. Frankly, my eyesight isn't that good, so having the excess "tails" poking through the terminal is a huge bonus.

Has something changed to make it acceptable to fit crimped rj45s onto solid core cable? Or have I misunderstood these posts?

 

[pirate]

You can get rj45s for stranded or solid cable, and some do both.

 

[Simon47]

Bear in mind that the cheap testers will only tell you that "pin 1 connects to pin 1, and so on ..." What they cannot tell you is that pins 1 & 2 are the two cores of one pair. "Split pairs" will pass fine on the cheap testers, but royally screw up any high speed signalling. At a previous job, we had no end of trouble with a Frame Relay WAN link in Italy - it was only after multiple complaints that the phone company did proper tests and found that the line was on a split pair.
A few years ago I spotted some Fluke DSP-100 sets (with smart-remote) for sale at a very nice price - one of the best purchases I've made over the years. It only certifies to Cat5, not Cat5e, but is invaluable for testing - and especially for fault-finding where it's TDR functions can pinpoint faults.
TDR = Time Domain Reflectometry. Send a pulse down a cable and measure the reflections, if you know the speed of signals in the cable, then you can convert time to distance. The DSP-100 also does Time Domain Crosstalk (TDX) which will often show you all the points in a circuit where the pairs are untwisted to fit the connectors !