Please Note: I do not take responsibility for your stupidty, if you break something that you paid a lot for, tough luck. I told you to be careful.

I have been around numerous websites that have mentioned rounding cables, the art of turning a flat and wide ide cable to a round and managable one. Why would someone go and risk cutting up a $3 cable? Because we want the absolute least amount of air restriction in our already cramped case. Now if all the other sites have done guides on rounding cables why do another one? Simple, I got pics for the guy next door who doesn't know jack about what rounding a cable entails. With that in mind, let us take a look at what we need for this simple project:

• IDE Cable (UDMA33) - $3
  
• Xacto Knife - $3.97
  
• Electrical Tape - $3.50 (comes in some nice colors)

I chose the easiest cable to round, the regular IDE cable, for this simple guide. Other cables like SCSI, floppy can also be rounded, i just chose to use the cheaper for this guide : )
The knife was chosen because I had it around from my Lucite case mod. It is probably the best knife to use to get precise cuts through the cable. I also chose electrical tape because I had that around, but you can substitute tubing, twisty ties, etc. to get those wires together.

-- Cutting

The best way to go about rounding your cables is to cut the cable in between every 4 or 5 th line. Just take the knife and slice a big enough slit to get your fingers in there:



Now take your fingers and run them through the cable and pull the slit down. Don't pull too fast or you'll expose the wires which means bad rounding job.



After 2 minutes of non-grueling work, you should get something like this:

-- Conclusion

Now I grabbed the cable and twisted the cut cables to make a nice round shape. With the electrical tape, I covered the entire cable to make it nice and smooth:



You can of course use tubing or ties to keep it together, but I prefer these colored tapes to add a little color into an otherwise bland PCB filled case.