Cable Management Tips

Managing seemingly endless miles of cables that come with your components can be frustrating. But, your design can’t actually run or function without cables and wires. Therefore, we can’t just ignore this problem. In this blog post, we have a few tips to deal with cable management when you’re prototyping and building enclosures with electrical components inside.

Fasteners

Tie-down fasteners are a must-have for any type of enclosure with component wiring in it. As with all of our self-clinching fasteners, we mechanically press tie-down fasteners into sheet metal to create a solid fastening point.

These tie-down fasteners specifically get inserted into a square hole anywhere on a flat surface. They come in a pretty wide range of sizes.

Once inserted, tie-down fasteners offer a mounting point. If you mount these in a strategic location, you can bundle up a lot of wires at once, and fasten them to this tie down point using zip ties, or other means.

Having a few of these located in areas that are wire or cable heavy can be extremely useful for managing the space inside your enclosure. This is to ensure that it’s not a mess of wires going every which way.

You can also opt to deploy cable-tie hooks as an alternative. This type of self-clinching fastener has a hook for looping wires through or around. While we do not stock cable-tie hooks at Protocase, we are happy to source them for you as a non-stock request.

Cable Tray

A cable tray is a simple piece of bent sheet metal that can be placed anywhere in your enclosure that wires would be run along. This allows a straight linear place for the wires to gather, keeping them away from other areas in your enclosure.

These can be especially useful for more wire-heavy enclosures with many components.

Bending a Small Tab

Similarly, but a little different would be bending a small tab within your enclosure’s inside. This would essentially offer another mounting point like a tie down.

Zip Ties

If you would rather not tie anything down to your enclosure, you could always zip tie your wires or cables together, then leave them running loose in a specific arrangement. Zip ties cost very little and come in a variety of colors and sizes. Plus, you can source zip ties just about anywhere, both online and in-store!

Early Planning

Finally, you should pay attention to cable management in the early planning stages of your design process.

Making note of the different wires and cables your build will include will help you plan better where they’ll need to go – and how they should be secured.

If you only think about cable management at the very end, you will find it difficult to fit your cables around all of your components. And you get frustrated again!

Working with Protocase

At Protocase, our mission is to take the frustration out of sourcing your custom enclosures and parts. Long lead times and latencies stifle your projects and kill your momentum. That’s why we’ve developed a unique mass custom manufacturing process that’s fast, flexible and easy.

Need your parts manufactured in 2-3 days? Give us a shout. We’re here to answer your questions and give you fast, accurate price quotes on the parts you need made.