Technopolis

Recently I bought a Velleman stranded wire kit because I occasionally need, say, a few inches of purple hookup wire but I don’t want a 100 foot roll of the stuff. Unfortunately, the wire in the kit comes in bundles, not on a spindle, so it’s only a matter of time before the bundle starts to look like this:

I thought about making spindles to wrap the wire on, but then I noticed the parts of an old VHS tape that I had lying around. Inside each VHS tape are two spindles that the magnetic tape is wound around. The center of the spindle is reasonably small, so there’s not a lot of ‘dead air’, and the walls of them are quite high, allowing for a lot of wire, so they actually work pretty well for storing wire. Here are a couple spindles with ~16 feet of 24 AWG stranded wire on each:

As you can see, there’s plenty of room left, so these spindles could probably handle much more (at least 100′ of 24 gauge). My first thought was to mount these spindles on a dowel and then mount the dowel in some kind of rack. I drilled out the center of one of the spindles, but found that, because of the drive sprocket receptacle in the back of the spindle, mounting them on a dowel would result in them wobbling unless I put something in the back side of the spindle to support the dowel. That sounded like an exercise in frustration, but then it occurred to me that I already had a ready-built holder for the spindles: the shell of the VHS cassette. The VHS cassettes that I have are held together by screws (not glued/fused together), so I was able to mount the spindles back in the shell, run the wire out holes in the bottom of the shell and then screw them shut. Note: I initially tried running the wire along the path that the tape had followed, but that turns out to be too narrow, even for 24 gauge wire. Fortunately, there are other, larger holes in the bottom of a standard VHS cassette. Here’s what it ends up looking like:

The nice thing about VHS cassettes is that they can be stacked compactly, allowing me to have eight spools of wire in a relatively small space:

I’m wondering if this approach would be useful for conserving horizontal space that’s taken up by conventional wire spools, which are wider and shallower, but I’m going to see how I like these before I bother transferring my 100′ spools to VHS.
Now if I could just figure out what to do with the old mag tape. :/