What do you do when the 50’ HDMI cable you ran through the ceiling during your home theater remodel breaks an end and you can’t snake a new one without ripping up drywall? Cut off the broken end, make a 50’ test lead for your continuity tester with some wire and a finish nail, then teach your 8 year old the proper way to test all 19 pins of the good end while you map which color wire they go to on the cut end on the other side of the room. Then do the same mapping on a replacement end you cut from a new HDMI cable (because of course the colors are different) and map them out on paper. Up next, breaking out the soldering iron. This may be my nerdiest fix ever.
And the final repair, after coating each splice with liquid electrical tape, wrapping each splice with regular electrical tape, then wrapping the entire thing up with a wooden dowel to prevent the repaired section from being stressed by bending.
could have tied new cable to the end of the broken one and pulled through to route the new one? your way def was way more interesting, though nice work. :tup:
That was the first thing I tried. The cable run had too many 90 degree turns. When I tried pulling it didn’t budge. Being the downstairs ceiling when I ran it I had to work around a bunch of plumbing, ducting, recessed lighting and a giant beam that holds my house up.
I thought I could get away without having to map each wire by buying the exact same make, model and spec cable from the same seller on Amazon, figuring all the wire colors would match up. Of course they didn’t even though the cables looked identical on the outside. Check out the mapping in the first pic (that I just fixed the link to). Even where the copper clad 3 wire matched up in color they decided to swap the wires for the A1 and B3 pins.
Yeah, I tested it when it was still unwrapped, after sitting there and making sure none of the bare splices were touching. I was about 50% confident. Not bad considering I taught an 8 year old how to probe the 19 tiny pins of an HDMI plug to help me do the testing on ceiling run cable since I couldn’t physically touch both ends with them being across the room. There was a lot of anticipation, especially since the projector takes about 45 seconds to boot up and turn on the HDMI input, so I was just sitting there waiting for the damn thing to turn on with my fingers crossed.
Not enough room behind the receiver, requiring it to make a pretty short radius 90 degree turn to go up the wall. I think “someone” (read wife) may have pushed the receiver back while putting stuff in that closet.
I would reccomend physically wrapping the entire splice with some sort of metallic shielding foil like what is covering the wires in the cable, but more important is that the shielding foil be electrically connected between the cables bc it acts like a ground bond between the projector and player.
There’s already a ground wire in the HDMI cable and it was one of the wires I spliced back together. I’ve seen zero issues with the lack of shielding so far even with the repaired section running near speaker wires.
Something I come across from time to to is damaged, defective, or incompatible HDMI cables. Something that is often overlooked in construction is conduit. If there had been one here in this situation FUCK would have been said quite a few less times I suspect.
Great work on the repair, That is not something many people would sort out themselves.
