Tutorial #1 – How to Cut Cloth Covered Wire

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Today with this post we are proud to announce a new section of our blog dedicated to tutorials and How To's for our cloth covered wire, lighting, and lamp parts. We're asked a lot if it’s hard to assemble our lighting products and lamp parts, or if you must call an electrician to do all work. With our new Tutorials section we hope to answer these type of questions and help you understand how to create your own ligting without the need to be an expert electrician! Through our photo guides and tutorials you will learn the basic steps to assembling Creative Cables’s lamp parts and lighting products so you can make the lighting of your dreams from table lamps to pendant lighting.
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Ready to get started? Good, let’s begin this by taking on one of the first things you'll need to do when using our cloth covered wire, cutting it to reveal the electric wires inside.

Any time you're making your own lights with our cloth wire your going to need to expose the copper wires that inside of the fabric and rubber insulation. You can do this with a few easy steps. But first here is our simple list of supplies that you're going to need to make cutting our cloth covered wire easier.

List of Supplies:
a) Some type of tape to wrap around the section of the cloth covered wire where you will be cutting. You can use electrical tape or just plain old "Scotch" tape that you have around the house. 
b) A pair of sharp scissors. 
c) Wire strippers - While not 100% necessary they make the job of getting the covers off the small interior wires much easier.

Here are the Steps to Correctly Cut the Wire:
*Note that for this How to cut cloth covered wire tutorial we will be taking into consideration the use of our round pendant light cords.*
Step 1) Wrap a layer of tape around the cloth wire fabric cable, about two 3/4 of an inch from the end that you’re about to cut. This is very important because the tape prevents the cloth fabric from fraying as you cut it. If you don't wrap the cloth covered wire then it's going to fray and be loose. That will make it difficult to use on your lamp or pendant lighting because the fabric will just start pulling away from the cord. So, do not skip this step.
Step 2) It's time to grab your scissors. Begin gently cutting the cloth wire cable on the spot where you taped it. All you want to do here is basically cut through the outer layer of cloth an "score" the rubber insulated coating that's under the fabric. You DO NOT want to cut all the way the rubber coating all at once. Use the scissors to kind rock gently back and forth and all around the cable. You'll see that the rubber insulated cover is beginning to cut through and that a gash is developing. You should start to see the colors of the three wires inside the insulated rubber. STOP CUTTING NOW. This is VERY IMPORTANT - if you cut through the outer insulation of the smaller wires inside on accident here start over. You need to make sure there are no cuts that go all the way through to copper of those wires.
Step 3) Now that you've got the start of a cut into the insulated rubber cable use your fingers and nails to do the rest of the work. Flex the cloth wire back and worth while using your nails to make the cut wider. You should soon be able to just pull the insulating rubber off the three (or two) wires inside.
Step 4) Once the wires inside of the insulated cable are exposed you will have to remove the insulation around the smaller electric wires that are located inside. If you have a pair of wire strippers (which can be purchased in any hardware store), all you have to do is use it on the insulation. All of our cloth covered wire pendant light cords are 18 guage. So just use the 18ga slot on the strippers. If you don’t have wire strippes then it's no problem! Just apply a small amount of pressure on the insulation with your scissors to expose the copper wire inside. Then, delicately peel back the rubber insulation until the wires are free, and connect them!

And that's it. You've completed the first step in preparing your cloth covered wire for your lighting project. In our next tutorial we'll look at more of our lighting and lamp parts and create more how to guides to creating your own lights.
Posted on 2018-10-13 Tutorial

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