Cable drum / reel recommendation

[cedd]

Hi all

I'm looking for a pair of drums that'll each hold 90m of Cat5. I bought a drum with my new desk that has 2 cat5's (Kelsey Duracat taped together) on it. I'm finding it less useful than I'd hoped though. Firstly it's not always the case that I want both of my stageboxes in the same place. More often than not I want one in the pit and one with my radio mics. Also the drum's less than great as it's not got any hooks to coil the tails that come out of the centre of the drum, so when I'm uncoiling they get in the way, get tangled and I'm pretty sure will eventually get damaged. LX tape keeps them stuck to the reel, but it's hardly an elegant solution. Oh, and the drum's only just big enough for all the cable, so it's often jumping off the side when I coil it.

 

I'm thinking of separating the 2 cat5's on to two drums (and ideally keeping hold of the existing drum as it'll hold one of my smaller analogue multi's).

 

There are plenty of cheapo drums out there that'll hold 100m of mic cable with ease, so 100m of Duracat shouldn't be an issue. I'm just after some suggestions of products people have had success with. I'm not against spending a bit of money on these if they protect and look after my very expensive cat5 cables.

 

I've seen a few companies with steel tube cable "cubes" - almost like a square box made out of tube which contains a drum that'll hold about 100m of cable (DMX in the instances I've seen). Stageline make their MCR-2 which looks perfect and quite robust, but sadly only holds 50m. The MCR-1 will hold more but moves away from that nice robust steel construction.

 

I've got another reason for wanting one with a tubular frame around it - I tend to run both cat5's in next to each other for most of their run, it's just the destination once they get to the stage that'll differ. It'd be nice to be able to cable tie the frames of both reels together when pulling them both in, as it'd mean I don't have to have 2 people to hold the reels whilst I pull the cable. Hopefully the weight of 2 tied together would make it a one man job. Nothing more annoying than pulling in a cable on your own off of a reel, only for the reel to fall over!

 

Googling hasn't brought me any joy finding alternatives. I said above that I don't mind spending a bit of money - but if I don't have to then it'd be great! I could just go for a cheaper domestic reel and live with it.

 

Of course the ideal would be a cube frame type reel that contains two drums on one common axle, that can either be locked together when reeling in both cables, or separately if they're both taking different routes. I suspect nobody makes one of these though......

 

Oh and of course, anything new has to do a better job of looking after the tails than my current one does. Just some hooks would do, or a hollow hub where they can live.

 

 

Edit to add

 

Found some of the steel ones I was trying to track down. Don't know why I never thought of Canford to start with (Actually I do - price!). They sell the CD-1 which is the product I've seen before. If you're feeling really flash then you could go for the CDS380CTS!

 

I'm wondering if some army surplus stores might yield some useful results now. They certainly have good robust kit!

[techywhizz]

how about looking at the range offered by vdc?

 

Try some of these My link

[Doug Siddons]

Or CLD got my neutrik cat 5 from here on a drum has proved to be very reliable

[Pete McCrea]

We use the Schill drums, Thomann seam to be cheapest. We've got them for 100m BNC and 100m CAT5 drums. The bounce when dropped and are pretty damned strong, and at a reasonable price.

 

Edit: We use the 310 for 100m cables.

[cedd]

Thanks for all the suggestions. Those Schill ones had caught my eye as being a pretty robust looking piece of kit if I decided against a metal framed one, so it's good to have a suggestion from somebody that's used them.

 

I've registered for an account with CLD so should be able to see some pricing soon. Looks like a useful company to have an account with anyway!

Looking at the links above has got me wondering if the makers of the current drum I've got sell an add-on cable coiler for the side of it to house the tails. I'll take a look at the make when I get home and do some searching. If they do then it'd save me a bit of cash if I only had to buy one drum and a pair of cable coilers. Capacity wouldn't be a problem once I only had a single cat5 coiled on it.

 

Hopefully this won't be a problem for too long - I've bought a box of cat5 and intend to pull a length or 2 in to each of my regular venues as and when I get chance. Might make a get-in slightly longer once, but as soon as it's in it'll save loads of times.

 

I'm quite surprised at the number of recieving houses who don't have cat5 infrastructure. I guess as most big touring shows will have plenty of other cabling to pull in anyway, there's little point, but it wouldn't half help out the little guys like me!

 

 

Edit to add;

 

Been doing some thinking. See if you can follow my logic here!

 

 

I really like the look of the Stageline MCR-2, but it'll only hold 50m of mic cable (which I assume means 6.5mm diameter).

 

My Duracat cable is only 5.4mm diameter.

 

Canford have a cable reel capacity calculator here which will let you put in you cable outside diameter and it'll calculate how much their drums will store. If I stick in an outer diameter of 6.5mm then the nearest product I can find to the capacity of the MCR-2 is the rubber drum CDR235, at 59m capacity. If I then stick in an outside diameter of 5.4mm then the CDR235 comes up as holding 98m of the stuff.

 

Does that therefor suggest that I stand a chance of getting 90m of cat5 on an MCR-2? I don't know how clever the Canford calculator is! I think it might just be do-able. Remembering that I'll also want a couple of metres of tails at the drum end, so that subtracts a bit of length too.

 

I think it might be worth a shot!

[cedd]

well, project "coil my cat5's" is complete.

 

I started off looking for an auxiliary winder for my existing drum, then realised it's just a steel drum that CPC sell. On the same page I spotted these (actually I lie, I bought the 290mm version, but it doesn't have a picture and looks pretty much identical. I also bought the optional auxiliary winders.

 

A night of snipping electrical tape and coiling cat5 later.... I have 2 of these;

http://i513.photobucket.com/albums/t335/ceddison/222A60C5-99EB-4258-8921-9BDA99D05A66-12765-000016698BE111A8.jpg

 

I'm pretty pleased with them all told. Would recommend them for others doing the same, and they're quite light on the old wallet too. Not quite what I was initially looking for, but they're very close!

 

Thanks for all the help