fu@king Bull$hit!!!! do they mean the tangles dont cost extra... i mean there has got to be someone i can sue over this false advertising arg if i had a buck for everytime i was on the third floor pulling some cable and the tangle free box got tangled well id have alot of bucks. do you guys prefer spools?

I ALWAYS get spools for coax - there is no other way. I understand why the pay out boxes are so popular, there're a lot more convenient & faster, so this is what most all the companies are requesting from their distributors. It's the few we are that want quality over quantity.
I find it almost impossible to find good quality coax on spools anymore - especially in white or 'gray' color - what the hell does black coax suppose to match anyway.

For Cat5, I love the spool in a box.

"Tangled boxes" are a lot easier to haul around than spools but thats about it.
I use both. A spool can end up wraped on the spool holder but it usually free's itself when it's a foot or two off the ground ( from pulling on the cable in frustration!)

When we first started runing cat 5, I thought 'twisted pairs' was a description of the cable!!

NOT what happens TO the cable!!

I'm now convinced that ALL cable is 'twisted pairs' regardless of it's construction!!

;-)

Pull more consistently and possibly slower.

Liberty has spools in boxes. Best of both worlds and you don't have to worry about the wire coming off the spool and creating a big twisted mess.

I have been a fan of spools for a long time.

I was forced to try spools in boxes for all of my Cat 5E and Cat 6 for a few months because my supplier went that route...

They are great until the box gets a little wet, or gets banged up a little from going to more than one jobsite, or gets dropped by the UPS guy delivering it to my shop, or any of a million other reasons that cause that crappy little spool rod to break off of the little plastic thing so the spool stops spinning in the box.

Cardboard and flimsy plastic are not good spool holders.

I have take apart plenty of those in my day and stuck them on my spool holders.
You cant rip off the box either, because you have to keep those broken boxes to store the spool in when it's not on the spool holder.

If you try to store or move the spools without the boxes, the cardboard spool sides get bent, fall apart and come off the hub of the spool and the wire goes all over.

I had to spend a couple hours winding wire back onto another empty spool because I didn't have any other wire with me.

Now we use Belden Cat 5E and Cat 6 that come on real spools with the handy cardboard sleeve thing to wrap back around the unused wire.

I keep some of those crappy cloth covered bungees on my spool holders. I use the fold down A-frame spool holders and I wrap the bungee around the very end of one side of the spool and hook the ends together under the legs and that slows the spools down enough so they don't unravel, but it doesn't add enough drag to make it any hard to pull or put category cabling over the pull force requirements.

The fold down green spool holders with the curved bottom from Greenlee
[Link: 198.247.193.8] sometimes allow the bungee to work it's way off.
Zip ties or tape stops that from happening.

You can't really use this with the LSD holders, but they are so flimsy that I replaced all of them with the Greenlees anyway.

I guess you could adapt this with the spool holding carts or the big spool wagon.
I just never bought into using those because they weigh a ton and we have to haul spools up and down basement stairs here in the midwest.

This is a case of ignorance on the part of the distributor.

The typical case in a small operation is for some beefy guy to walk over to a carton, pick it up, walk it to you, then swing the carton forward and bang it on the ground right in front of you. Very impressive.

Problem is, the two things that will destroy tangle-free payout are rotating the wire within the carton, ("swing the carton forward") and subjecting it to a lot of vertical or horizontal force ("bang it on the ground").

I won't accept cartons that I have seen handled that way. And I will call the sales department to tell them why THEY had a problem with me in will-call.

While my distributor had lots more pluses before it went from independent to AVAD, the sheer volume of their business means the stock guys have learned that they can't work all day if they are throwing boxes around. They have nice little carts and they handle the boxes pretty well.

I picked up four boxes yesterday. I'll let you know.


Yeah, me too.

The box without a spool has several advantages. It has one hole in line with the center of gravity so you can pick it up with one hand. When you pull, there is no spool to keep unrolling after you quit pulling. You don't have to pull hard at the beginning to get a spool started.

The "spool in a box" manages to undo ALL of those advantages -- try carrying one with one hand -- while supplying a spool that cannot survive on its own out of the carton.

This is very much like the TV manufacturers removing discreet commands, or Samsun changing a TV so that Channel Up no longer takes the TV to its tuner: someone who had NO IDEA why something existed has implemented what they think, in ignorance, makes sense. And is maybe an improvement!

My branch taped the boxes with that wet glue paper tape machine, but only for boxes that were going to be shipping....

I used to ask that my boxes get taped like that even though I picked up.
This helped, especially on the tall coax boxes that always seem to turn to mush after sitting in a van for a few weeks with tool bags and ladders being dragged across them. (not a peep out if you, Jay)

Now I just buy my coax and UTP on spools from another local Belden supplier that keeps it on hand for me.

I still buy all of speaker wire from the local A**D branch for now, but only the original ProFlex skus. If that ever goes away for the Chinese stuff, I will be very upset.

BTW, I don't like that we post our suppliers names on here considering that this is a public forum and most of these places have account apps on the home page...

Anyone else want to help laying out a shorthand??
Maybe we could use abbreviations like stock tickers or asterisks.

A**D
A*I
CAP

Daniel, would you be willing to do a perform a little admin magic and replace these names with some abbreviations??

We use these:

[Link: rack-a-tiers.com]

Love them...

One thing to remember when using the boxes without spools, never push the wire back into the box. If you have to coil the wire up and put it in the handle. When you push the wire back in, it gets tangled with the prewraped and then turns into one gigantic knot.

I use both reels and boxes. I like the convienence of the box, but nothing pisses me off more than having to go down two flites of stairs to find my box four feet off the ground because it got tangled up.

A resounding second for Rack A Tiers. Could never go back...

You know, my boss thinks he's the one-man payout system.

I just saw the Rack-a-tiers for the first time on a 30,000 ft2 residential job we are in. The electricians were from a large commercial firm, and they used HUGE spools on the rack-a-tiers and gas pipe.

I just want to know who had to haul those spools down into the basement... I thought structured wire spools were heavy.

I just went to the Rack-a-tier site. they've got several nifty little things I haven't seen before, although I have seen the racks plenty of times. The cartoon for the ladder bungee had me out of my chair laughing. What a riot. Those people have an excellent sense of humor.