Phew, done with the power cords !
The 2 pronged ones were a nightmare to work with... they were super stiff, and being flat rather than round, didn't hep roll them nicely. Had to straighten them first, then roll them very slowly, to keep that flat jacket from twisting and make a mess of the job.
They are so stiff, I could swear they were using rigid / solid core wires... but I cut one off to check and... no, stranded wires they sport ! Weird... so it must be the insulating jacket itself that's SO stiff ?! Boy, it's quite something. Cheap PVC but still ! Maybe after many years the PVC hardens ?!
Anyway, was a chore but I think the result is acceptable, and an order of magnitude better than it was before, for sure... so happy enough.
Went with the zip ties in the end. Cheaper than I thought. H/W store had plenty to choose from. Bought a plastic jar full of them, an assortment of 3 sizes, 500 pieces in all, for only 7+ Euros. Not complaining.
While at the store I also bought a wooden 3 drawer unit, to store and sort the cables. No luck, I under estimated the volume all these cords would necessitate... so for now it's back into a plastic container until I buy larger drawers.
But these little wooden drawers (40cm wide by 30x30) however are just the right size for about everything else in the lab... so in just 10 minutes I had found a perfect use for all 3 drawers :
- One is perfect to store all my excess scope probes, 11 of them. I usually only just use a x1/x10 100MHz probe on my Fluke/Philips "Combiscope", my daily driver, so I just keep that probe at all times laying atop the scope, on hand. All other probes I rarely need so I don't need them to clutter the bench or my main / nearby drawers.
- Another drawer is perfect to store all my DMM test leads I just bagged the other day
- Last drawer is perfect to welcome all the coax adapters, BNC and MiniQuick, that I sorted into 3 boxes the other day. This way I keep on hand only a small selection, just what I need to work most of the time.
Really perfect size for most of the stuff in the lab, so I can see myself buying a number of these little drawers soon, as I progressively sort through all my moving boxes to organize all my stuff and bring the lab into operational status so to speak....
So, test leads sorted, power cords sorted, probes sorted, coax adapters sorted, coax cables acquired.... it's going well, lab v2.0 is being shaped a bit more every day