The moment I realized I was stripping coax wrong for years

So I've been installing cable for about 4 years now, mostly residential stuff in the suburbs outside Denver. A few weeks back I was on a job with this older guy, like 30 years in the game, and he watched me strip a cable with my standard tool. He just goes "you're leaving way too much braid on there" and showed me his method. Turns out I was only getting like 60% of the shielding off because I was rushing and not aligning the tool right. I had issues with signal loss on longer runs and always blamed the splitters or the customer's setup. Now I check every termination with a multimeter and it's night and day difference. Has anyone else had a basic skill they thought they had down but were actually messing up the whole time?

2 comments

2 Comments

richard_hall4d ago

Yeah I was with you until I tried @carr.willow's way and it totally changed my mind.

carr.willow4d ago

Hold on though... I've been doing this for like 15 years and I actually leave a little more braid on purpose for grounding. If you take too much off you can lose that solid connection to the fitting and get intermittent issues instead of just signal loss. Had a whole neighborhood where I kept getting callbacks until I figured out it was guys stripping too clean.