How to Crimp Cat6 cable

Recently, I have had a need to crimp my own cables for wiring up a house to install ethernet outlets across a house. Since all the wires require a different length, I opted to order two giant spools of Cat6 for all my wiring needs. So you may be wondering why I opted for Cat6 and not Cat5e. Well the answer is simple, future proofing. Since Cat6 can support 1Gbps, and Cat5e can only 100Mbps, it made sense to spend the money now than have to upgrade the cables later. With Cat6, local LAN transfer speeds will be super fast! A tutorial on how to setup ethernet outlets will be in another article. For now we will focus on how to crimp cables.

Requirements

In order to crimp a Cat6 cable, you will need the following items:

1 Desired length of 23AWG Cat6 500MHz UTP Solid Riser Rated Ethernet Cable
1 RJ45 Modular Plug Tester
1 8P8C RJ-45 Network Cable Crimper
1 or 2 depending on wire Cat6 Plug Solid W/Insert 50U

The items listed are the exact tools that I have ordered and used to crimp Cat6 cables in this tutorial. Since Cat6 uses RJ-45, this will work with other Ethernet cords as well such as Cat5 and Cat5e.

Instructions

RJ-45 Connector(top) with Insert Holder(bottom).
Here is the Cat6 Plug for the ethernet end. You will notice that there are two pieces which is not typical when ordering RJ-45 connectors, but the second small piece will make crimping much easier. The smaller piece called the insert holder will help you organize your wires in place when inserting it into the rest of the RJ-45 connector.

Cat6 Ethernet Cable with unfinished end

The first thing you want to do is to strip about an inch of the outer coating to make organizing and wiring easier.

Once you strip the outer coating, you should get something similar to this in Cat6. There will be a clear plastic piece inside that separates the 4 pairs and a string. You want to cut the clear plastic piece and string out before you begin organizing your wires.

Once you cut out the clear plastic piece and string, just untangle the wires so you can use the insert holder in the next step. Also note there there is still a little bit of clear plastic at the end, but that is okay!

Now you want to insert the wires into the insert holder with the smooth back on the bottom, and the side with the ridges and metal on top. Organize the wires from left to right in the order shown above.
Half Orange, Orange, Half Green, Blue, Half Blue, Green, Half Brown, Brown.

Make sure you push the wires through the insert holder with about a cm between the insert holder and the outer coating as seen above. From there you will want to make an even cut with your crimper as seen above. Make sure the crimper blades are not super close to the insert holder, give it a tiny bit of space.

Nice even cut with the crimper. You will notice that we left a little bit of space at the end of the connector, and this is intentional.

Now you want to push the wire into the RJ-45 connector. Make sure that the insert holder sits evenly inside and you can see the ends of the wires in front of the connector.

Once you have verified that you can see the ends of the wires in front of the RJ-45 connector. You now want to use your crimper to actually crimp the cable as shown above. Make sure the RJ-45 connector is in all the way and squeeze the crimper to finish the connection between the wire and RJ-45 connector.