Gadgetory

hey everyone i'm steve from gamers nexus Donette and today we're making an ESD grounding cable so ESD as many of you likely know stands for electrostatic discharge and that's a bad thing that's when if you touch something in cold dry weather for instance and you feel like a shock to your card or that's that's ESD that's electrostatic discharge and if you do that to a computer component you will definitely damage it if it's a high enough voltage and to give an idea of thins when we emit a charge that is something you can feel as a human it can be thousands of volts and a CPU for example can take about one maybe two volts depending on the manufacturer and the CPU so it's not going like a couple thousand volts that will kill it or severely damage it and to reduce the chance of ESD when system building you can use things like ESD wrist straps they're not perfect they're a nice gesture but if you utilize them incorrectly if you don't connect them to true ground on the grounding end then it's not going to do anything so for a surefire way to ground yourself before working on a system we can make our own grounding cable and this only requires a normal power cable that you get with your power supply so if you have an extra one then use that and require some wire cutters and this also has a part to strip the gauge of the wire once we cut through so you'll need those two separately if you don't have one tool that does both this is what we do for use in our testing environment to make sure we're grounded properly before rotating GPUs and things like that so it is something that I trust a couple of notes this is done entirely at your own risk I can tell you how to do things you should probably use a multimeter at the end to check just for 100% certainty that everything is good to use but don't at your own risk because if you do it improperly can definitely give you a shock and this is just a normal power cable we're using 115 volt outlets because we're in the US and what you do is you need to bend the two prongs on the power cable you cut the the receiving end of the cable that goes into the computer and then as you can see once we've cut through the receiving end all that's done at this point is stripping the gauge of the wire to expose the copper for the actual cable for our power cable and any American power cables that I'm familiar with you'll want to expose only the green copper underneath the housing so the black and white which is what we have in this cable are the two wires that we don't want we want only the green and then you strip the green housing off of the copper to expose it and to strip the housing you might have to as we did cut into the housing slightly not all the way through but maybe a quarter of the way through and do that on each side and then just pull it off with your hands and the same is true for the black housing on the cable itself once you've exposed the copper wire inside of the cable you should twist the ends of it so that it remains intact through use and with the two prongs bent and the single fatter circular prong remaining that effectively means that we are only connected to ground through the outlet the third prong means ground for safety purposes you can cover up the other two wires the black and white in our case with electrical tape and if you wanted to you can cover up the tube bent prawns with electrical tape although if those don't go in the outlet they won't draw any power or current through them we don't do this for our cabling we're pretty confident that ours are safe but for safety reasons if you want to it won't hurt anything to cover those bits up with electrical tape so you do not want the smaller prawns connected that's why we bend them if they snap when you bend it cover the snapped part with electrical tape just for safety to make sure there's no current going through they're received from the wall and then before you work on your system whether it's open air or in a an actual case just tap the wire the copper bit at the end that's exposed and that will ground you definitively and obviously things can happen you can still damage components of latent ESD or other types of ESD but this is a a much more sure way to ground yourself before working on it and if you want it to be even more sure you can connect your ESD wrist strap to that exposed part of the cable and then wear that on your wrist and that will keep you grounded throughout the process of building so that is all for this video check the channel for more helpful videos like this and our patreon page which is linked in the post roll video if you're interested in helping us make more of these again at your own risk but this is what we do in the lab it works really well for staying grounded and keeping all the components protected so I will see you all next time