Telephone Cable Bus Bar

When we built our house, Louise and I pulled cables for telephone, Ethernet, and video from 39 boxes throughout the house to a network closet in the basement. Unfortunately, I chose CAT-5 cable with stranded instead of solid wires.

I intended to use a punch-down block in the network closet to connect the 39 cables to the phone service cable, but the punch-down terminals didn't work with stranded wires. So I "temporarily" soldered the wires together in clumps, like these two.

After five years of living with this kludge, I built a bus bar to connect the cables. Two lengths of #18 bare wire are soldered to six pairs of brass wood screws driven into a 15½" 1x2 board. Another 1x2 "comb" has 39 ¼" holes drilled in it to spread the cables along the bus.

Two wires from each cable are soldered to the bus wires. This still requires stripping and soldering 78 wires, but the result is much neater and easier to maintain then the original arrangement.

Calculating how far apart to space the 39 holes along the board yielded 0.375" between holes – not easy to measure and mark by hand. So I used the milling machine as a precision drill press. I clamped the 1x2 in the vise, and aligned the X-Y table for the first hole. Six turns of the X-axis knob moved the table exactly 0.375" to the next position.

When the table reached the end of its X travel, I shut off the machine, lowered the bit into the last hole drilled, loosened the vise,cranked the table back to its starting position, then drilled the remaining holes. This photo shows the 1x2 just after repositioning the table. The tiny mark on the right end is the target for the final hole. How close will it be?

The 39th hole was only about 0.02" away from the target at the end of the total span.

The milling machine made this job much easier and faster than manually marking the holes and drilling them on a regular drill press.