Wiring it up!
OK, now I'll show you how to wire the EL Cable up.

First off, EL Cable does not need one wire at each end like normal wire. It has two wires going through out it which can be taken care of at one end. And you can just cut off whatever you don't need/want.

Now, I'll explain how to solder EL Cable. To start you'll need to strip the Transparent Plastic Layers off of the EL Cable carefully. Be careful, becasue you can cut through those two tiny wires. They are not fun. Next you should see two tiny wires wrapping around the phosphour, try to bend these outward in the same direction. If one is cut, don't worry. You only need one of these tiny wires. Then you can strip the phosphour off of the middle wire with your fingernail. If you don't have fingernails you can use the edge of a knife/razor blade. Just be careful. I like to leave a little bit of phosphour so the two wires dont touch and short it out.

Here is a mockup I made of where to solder.

Now solder a piece of wire (preferrably not your inverter wire, so you can make it longer) to the large middle wire, and solder another piece of wire to your small wire/wires. Now remember if using heatshrink to put it on the wire before soldering. And if not using heatshrink, be sure to use something. I used masking tape on mine :-) I couldn't find my electrical tape and just spotted the masking tape. I taped twice. Once around the middle wire and again around it all. This should do just fine.

Here you can see the wire is soldered.
You can also see no wires on one end

Here you can see the soldered EL Cable turned on.

My EL Cable inverter took 12v DC. They have other models which take different voltages and some that take 110 AC. To wire a 12v inverter you will have to connect the red inverter wire to a 12v line. In your computer, your power supply has such a line in case you didn't know (I hope you did). On a molex connector (cd-rom and hdd power cable) there are generally 4 color wires. Actually 3 colors but 4 wires. 1 yellow wire, 1 red wire and 2 black wires. Don't connect the red wire to red wire. Red is your 5v line, and yellow is your 12v line. The two blacks are grounds. I'm sorry but I didn't take pictures on how to wire a molex. You can also connect it to a fanbus. But you'll have to do that by yourself. :-)

<< Page 2 | And now to wrap things up >>