Wire Pulling Tool

As I said in my previous post, we've got lots of cables run around the building already. But we do occasionally have to pull wires to a place that we weren't planning on running a PC. In the past, we used wire coat hangers, other wire, or whatever else we could find lying around. Now, we're carrying Greenlee tools, so we have the J-Hook tips on 12' rods for pulling wire. They call them "Fish Stix", but they're not for lunch.

They're even pretty strong. Greenlee rates them as 200 pound minimum pulling strength. That's not bad at all, and great for when a cable is a little stubborn. There are even additional tips for different sizes of wires, and multiple stix can be connected together, making for 4', 8' and 12' lengths to match the job. It's almost exciting to run our next cable run now that we can go fishing, but not quite. But it'll be much more enjoyable than last time and should involve fewer bandages.

CATV Wire Stripper

We finally got a hand tool more designed for us geeks. It's a CATV wire stripper. Being a dotcom, we have plenty of use for a Cat5 wire stripper... but we also have cable modems and CATV around the building as well.

What really makes me think I need one of these for home, though, is that it also has a cartridge included to strip both RG6 / RG59 cable (cable TV and antenna cable), which I've had to do many times and haven't had much luck with. With this one, you just put a tooth on either side of the cable, spin it a few times, then let the stripped end show. It really makes it pretty simple.

As you can see from the picture to the left, we're actually pretty wired at the office already. I don't think we'll need to run a ton more Cat5, but now I could run a Cable TV wire to my desk and install that TV tuner card... or maybe not. I doubt that'd be conductive to getting much work done.