About Us
Welcome to Patch Panel Tools
In 1989 I had been working as a cable installer for a number of years - in that period of time I learned that I didn’t like dressing cable. So I began my efforts to come up with a better way to dress cable. The challenge was to design a tool that could be used to dress cable at the MDF (Main Distribution Frame), a raiser closet and also be capable of adding cables to an existing bundle. I spent a number of years working with various prototypes before deciding on the Cable Dresser design.
The Cable Dresser was put through its paces in Silicon Valley with MDF’s that were nothing more than a closet to places like IBM, Apple, and HP that had MDF’s as large as a small house. The larger the MDF, the longer the cable run to be dressed; if you try and align all the cables in a bundle the difficulty in dressing the bundle would go up proportionally with the length of the cable bundle. This is not the case when aligning the cables on the outside of the bundle - cables on the outside of the bundle can easily be separated from those cables in the middle of the bundle.
There are three excellent reasons for aligning only the cables on the outside of a bundle. First, it’s easier to separate and align the cables on the outside of the bundles from the cables on the inside of the bundle. Second, if you align all the cables in the bundle you dramatically increase the potential for Alien Cross Talk between cables. The third reason is being able to dress a larger bundle sizes decreases the potential for Alien Cross Talk, and also provides better rack utilization and fewer bundles to dress.