How to

David Calson · June 24, 2006

Is there a fast method to making a difficult stinger coil back like it should? I have one that's very long and severely out of whack.

Phil Rhodes · June 24, 2006

Hi,

As with any cable, if it's been improperly coiled, especially over someone's arm with no attention paid to the way it wants to go, then it's damaged permanently. It probably won't stop working, at least in the short term, but there's no practical way to fix it.

Phil

Chris Keth · June 24, 2006

It won't go back perfectly, but if you coil it out straightand have a couple people pull on it (think lightish tug of war, you don't want to break anything) it will often help the situation some.

Hal Smith · June 24, 2006

I've tied a piece of rope with a couple of clove hitches in sequence to one end of a badly abused cable, tied the rope to something stout (like a trailer hitch on my van), and yanked it out straight by myself. As Chris notes, it won't bring the cable back like new but it helps. Make certain the cord hasn't got any twists in it before torturing it - that'll lessen the change of damaging the internal wires.

David Calson · June 25, 2006

thanks for your help guys!

Matthew Parnell · June 25, 2006

Ive found leaving a cable out for a couple in the sun, uncoiled and straight(with a bit of light tension through it) on bitumen on a hot day usually works wonders for mic cables, it worked well for stingers as well, but they had to be left out longer(mic cables have softer insulation).

I made sure that the guys that did it never did it again however.

Edited June 25, 2006 by Matthew Parnell

Robert Goodrich · June 26, 2006

I was a road manager for a travelling theatre show, and we had 100' lengths of speaker cable. Always used to get tangled and twisted.

At the end of every week, when we returned home, we would visit a 5-story parking garage. We would tie off the cables to the back of the van and hang them over the edge and eat our fast food dinner and BS about what we did that week. By the end of dinner, the twists would have worked themselves out, and we could retrieve the cables and get a nice coil (although, 100' speaker cables are real deltoid busters).

My last year on tour we bought these cable spools that had a hand crank (you see them sometimes used with garden hoses). You just yanked out enough cable to reach the speakers, and then hand cranked them back in at the end of the show. It was like we had discovered fire. Marvelous devices.