I find this interesting - as lately i've found that keeping a supply of various lengths of commercially-manufactured leads of appropriate colours, etc, has been a better long term solution than home-made leads. Perhaps I just suck at crimping cables, but I prefer to use commercially made (and tested) leads.
The drawback, of course, is when you run out of the right length and wind up using longer cables, which in turn makes cable management a bit of a mess...
Maybe we just wire in more tight places, but I find that it's somewhat difficult to deal with more than about three excess inches when doing in-frame wiring. I don't want to have to deal with excess. It is (maybe was? haven't looked in several years) difficult to find someplace that will manufacture quality Cat6 molded cords in arbitrary lengths in relatively small quantities. There's a million places that will be happy to custom-make you Cat6 crimped or crimped+booted cables, but if I wanted that, I could hire a monkey to make them for us at a cheaper price. If I'm going manufactured prefab, I want molded. Given that, and given that the shop (where we could maintain significant stock) is not always convenient (for ex., equipment in Ashburn, shop in Milwaukee) the easier solution has typically been to keep a few 1000' spools and make cables to exact length as needed. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.