Last spring, the zipper pull broke on my light jacket. I used a paper clip as a temporary replacement, but that looked pretty nerdy. I wore it last week, and felt a bit self-conscious about it, and was careful to keep the clip hidden while out & about, and was thinking seriously about replacing it. After all, it was getting to be several years old, and not exactly the peak of winter fashion.
But last Friday I walked in the front door carrying my tool bag, I had a sudden burst of inspiration; why not use a bit of wire and an RJ-45 plug for the zipper pull? It’d be the perfect geek accessory on the jacket!
So here is the final result. I’ll call it Version 1.
It was pretty simple, really; I took a length of Cat. 5 cable about 4 inches long, pulled the twisted pairs out of it and threaded two pairs through the business end of the zipper. I then doubled the wires back, straightened them out — being careful to arrange the colored wires in an aesthetically-pleasing manner — and clipped them off about 2 inches from the zipper. Then the RJ-45 went on the end and got crimped down, and there you have it!
The same thing could be done with an RJ-11 plug and a single twisted pair, but the RJ-45 allows for two pairs, and presumably double the strength.
A couple of afterthoughts about this mod upon completion; a much cleaner installation could be achieved by slipping some Cat. 5 cable jacket or heat-shrink tubing over the wire before crimping the connector in place… Just enough to fit in between the zipper and the crimp. As it is, the small amount of exposed wire doesn’t really present the effect I was hoping for. Another option would be to use solid color wire, and the same color on all four strands. That would allow the color to be coordinated with the jacket, giving a more pleasing color combination. Or maybe just wrap some black electrical tape around the exposed wires… It’d be nice to have a molded end on the plug, but that’d probably involve a used cable as most of those are molded with the cable in place. There you’d have to do some kind of twisting and/or soldering on the backside of the zipper to keep it in place. But then again I have seen some patch cables that have hoods that aren’t molded in place and could be slid onto the thing; I’ll have to keep my eye out for one of those for Version 2.