Date: 20241218
Lacing cord is this very nice material used to wrap wire harnesses. It was used before zip ties, mainly in the business of telecom, in order to easily attach the numerous wire bundles present everywhere in telephone exchange offices. Since then, the technique has been applied in a number of places where loose cables had to be tamed, including the internal electrical wiring of electrical appliances.
It has also been used at NASA, and they are still using it. The reason is that the lacing cord used in this technique is soft enough to wrap cables without hurting the insulation materials, it can be reworked, and can be used to create quite complex harnesses.
I find cable lacing is a very neat technique, and even if its usage is now generally out of fashion, it still works extremely well, and is still a very valid technique once you master the technique. It uses simple materials, is very flexible, and to be honest, it looks cool.
I am not going to offer a tutorial on the technique, the web has ample information including NASA manuals and many descriptions. There is no magic way, you just have to try it and train yourself.
The first way is to buy it. The stuff is still available in places where you find electronic components. Farnell sells rolls made by Alpha wire. This is not really cord, but narrow tape, which holds better to wire. The ends will fray if you dont cut them with a soldering iron, and it's expensive.
The second way is to find it second hand. It was a common material back in the time and your grand family may still have a roll of the old stuff in a drawer. You can maybe also find it at a garage sale or at a thrift store.
The third method is the most interesting, you can make it yourself, and that's why we are here.
The only two required ingredients are:
The required tools are very simple, just a source of gentle heat, to melt the wax in a pot.
Once the wax is liquid, just put the twine in the wax. It will suck it by capillarity. The trick is now to gently pull the string from the wax so it has time to set before you let it touch anything. This is easier to do than it sounds. You can store the waxed twine on a roll or bobbin.
Try to maintain this as a continuous process for long runs of twine, since this will help maintain a consistent wax load in the twine, avoiding the formation of drops. If too many wax solidifies on the twine, just let it go back in the melted wax and pull it slowly, making sure the drop goes back into the melt.
When people think about wax, two kinds come to mind:
Many people have tried to make lacing cord using candle parrafin wax, but it will not work, because parrafin is brittle and will break into a nasty powder when moved around, instead of maintaining flexibility. That's because it's made of long linear hydrocarbon chains (20 to 40 carbons according to wikipedia), not unlike wet spaghetti, and the paraffin molecules have only very little adhesion between themselves. When it cools paraffin just "freezes" but has no cohesion. In other words, it makes big fragile crystals of fat.
Microcrystalline wax is very far from this. Its molecules have branching, which dramatically increases its plasticity, as the molecules will interlock and allow movement without destroying the material. This wax is not a natural product, it is a residue of petrol refining. Wikipedia has a lot of accurate information about it:
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcrystalline_wax
The elasticity and stickiness of microcrystalline wax is what makes it good for lacing cord. Once it has wicked in the twine, it will stay here even if the cord moves around and is wrapped around wires. When you tighten the cord, it will compress and tend to stick the wires together so they dont slip, and that will also allow very tight knots. Another advantage is that it will prevent the end of the cord from fraying.
None of this is possible with paraffin wax, it is simply too brittle to acept any movement when it has set.
It is sold in specialty and online stores for creative purposes. I suspect the following products also contains microcrystalline wax: foundry wax, modeling wax, lost casting wax, jewelry making wax. But in unknown proportions.
But this is where it gets interesting: you dont need a specialty store. You have it right in front of your eyes, in the supermarket: yes, it's in the crust of babybel cheese! You know? The red cheese blobs that kids like but not adults. It's easy to find and quite cheap, you can throw the cheese away but kids and pets [and stray mice] will eat it. You can too, it can be a snack. Of course it does not replace a good cheese. Eating is not the point here, but wasting food is never a good idea. Do not buy babybel just to throw the cheese away!
Just be sure to keep every bit of the ugly red sticky waxy crust!
Once melted it has just the right consistency to make lacing cord using kitchen twine. How cool is that? NASA stuff, right from the grocery store!
I think this is one of the coolest hack that ever came to my mind!
A good final remark from Rue Mohr on Mastodon: Will mice go after the cheese wax? Are they likely to chew a wire harness made like this? I dont know and I dont think particularly so. The wax has little smell and once melted it is possibly not very attractive to mice without a reward hidden in it. On the other hand mice will chew everything they find, so it's quite difficult to determine if they like this more.
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