by Mark Erbaugh N8ME

The topic of the March meeting of the Madison County ARC was putting connectors on coax.
One purpose was to show how to do it. The other was to build some cables for the club to use
on Field Day. A comment was made that cables made in the past tended to “disappear.”

I am a 3D printing nerd, so I came up with the idea of 3D printed sleeves that could be installed
on the coax before the connectors were added and that identified the coax as belonging to the
club. These would be harder to remove than a taped on paper label. I designed a sleeve using
OpenSCAD and printed a bunch of them sized for RG-8X and a text of MCARC. At the club
lunch the other day, someone mentioned that the club had just had a donation of some LMR-
400 and it would be nice to have sleeves for it.

I reworked my OpenSCAD script to allow for adjustable coax diameters, colors and text labels.
I’ll share my script with anyone interested. If you don’t want to mess with OpenSCAD directly,
I’ve uploaded it to MakerWorld* as parametric model under the title “Coaxial Cable Sleeve.” My
user name on MakerWorld is “microenh.”

• MakerWorld is the Bambu Lab site for sharing 3D models.
• Visit the link here MakerWorld