Anyway I make my own World’s Best Cables.
Have soldering iron, conquer the world!
Yup, that is what WBC and other budget cable builds that build for quality do, they pick the best components and use best practices in the construction and design and offer a better price than the original.
Making our own can save even more money, but cost a lot more if you aren't already set up to do it, and already have gained experience soldering and cable making. I don't recommend it to an amateur novice looking to save a few bucks unless they are prepared to invest in the tools, redo the work several times, and perhaps ruin cable/connector stock in the process. All costly entries to start up DIY cable making from scratch.
I started building cables professionally - for pay - when I was in Jr. High. I had the great fortune of making friends with a buddy whose father was an Engineer with his own consulting company, with contracts with top industry customers back in the late 60's/70's, and he took me on to apprentice.
I worked building cables, wire-wrapping, silk-screen boards, doing point to point soldering, and fine soldering on small circuits where my small hands - I was 13 to start - could fit into places grown-up hands couldn't easily reach. He specialized in test rigs for projects, test equipment builds, cable arrays for taking measurements - some hundreds of feet long. Some as small as need to fit inside fish for tracking them in rivers.
I also did a lot of other things required to take a project contract from plans to tested and calibrated end result to a customer, a great training ground to get all the skills a product engineer needs to be successful. And, I earned good money, far better than I earned selling greeting cards door to door starting at 8, and that was good money too.
After a year of apprenticeship, I had started High School, and he placed me with a larger company doing contract work for a wide range of digital and analog controls for turbine engines, working on racks of relays being converted to digital controls. They also did medical component builds, and test equipment for various medical laboratories, which meant on occasion I worked on those builds to help get them out the door.
I was on the manufacturing push line for a year there, then one day I was asked to build from plans a test rig for a new board, and after completing that, writing the test scripts for it, running a few trays of test boards through it, I graduated to test technician. After doing that for a year I was loaned out to the Engineering department to work on new designs, the first being an RCA Cosmac 1802 design.
Then I was asked to program an 8080 system in Macro Assembler an entire inventory system to track components from purchasing through incoming test through kitting for projects, and on to finished deliverables - at the same time I asked to work in purchasing to gain experience with the component costs and lead times.
So, I have had a long career of building, testing, and engineering electronics, if I wanted to build cables for fun I would, if I wanted to build cables to save money - I would chuckle to myself - and then look for well constructed cables using top components that I would use to build my own cables - to save time.
If you are trying to learn by doing DIY projects, building cables is a good start, and I recommend it. But, not for everyone, most people just want a well made cable using top components for their home systems. There is nothing wrong with that need either, because not everything needs to be built from scratch. Sometimes we just need a built assembly to use to construct an overall system to enjoy - our focus for design is higher up on the component build chain.
But, I really enjoyed building cables while I was going through the process of learning how to build them, especially the ones with dozens of wires - the big round green ones - and the long long long ones with wires and sensors potted into rods strung together for what seemed like an endless chain, to be dropped into the ocean to measure temperature layers in the depths. Fun stuff.
