First off - I've read that building a
snake from the
ground up is generally discouraged because the amount of work and the price of components typically makes it not worth it.
I get that - but I have most of the raw materials and a very small budget. I've got a leftover spool of 24
AWG shielded and jacketed (white)
XLR cable, plenty of
XLR M & F cable connectors, and the soldering equipment needed. Would it be viable to buy a large length of
heat shrink (somewhere in the range of 50'-100') and use that to make a 6
conductor snake? Would something like techflex work? I'm okay with spending some time on this if necessary.
If this is a ridiculous idea - what else can I use this cable for? It doesn't feel durable enough to make standalone
XLR's out of.
I wouldn't waste my time with solid-conductor cable for that kind of use.
As far as viability of building your own snakes, it's what we all had to do years ago as there were very few off-the-shelf products and what was available was really expensive.
Time spent doesn't have to be economically viable or anything hobby related would be considered a waste. I've seen people accusing others of wasting time on such things then going home and sitting in front of the TV for hours every night.
Yes if you are on somebody else's payroll you need to be aware of wasteful time, but for your own business or personal hobby there's no such thing is non-viable use of one's time -I used to make my own snakes at night while watching TV!
That being said however I still made sure to have a decent final product and solid-core 24awg would result in a busted
snake not too long after initial deployment -but I did use leftover installation-grade mic cable many times for custom patch-snakes. I found it next to impossible to pull the lines through more than 20' of
heat shrink -mostly because it comes off the
roll flat and is not the most-smooth of inner surfaces.
I found that 3" bands of it spaced every
foot or so were perfectly adequate -especially for permanent install uses in the studio or
venue, but it seemed to hold up well for
portable use too. Perhaps sliding the finished banded-product through techflex would help for that kind of use.
I do remember touring with a 125' home-made return-snake made of 12 lines of West-Penn 291
banded every
foot with
e-tape and no additional
strain relief on any of the
XLR ends. Got deployed then stowed back in the bus every night for over 8 months and ended up being the least-repaired piece of gear on that tour! (was meant to be temporary until an actual
multicore product was ordered, but that fell through the cracks or something and we just went with it indefinitely)
I haven't built a
snake in years, but nowadays I get everyone else's broken discards (as they
chase the New&Shiny) -and just repair it for far less work than building from scratch