Ten-minute Hack: Controlling the Wire Monster

It should be no big surprise that I have more than one loose wire running around the dashboard of my car. I actually have three: two USB micro cables to charge my cellphone and earpiece, and a stereo headphone cable to plug the phone into the AUX jack of my car (memo to self: next car... USB audio in or bust). These wires are not only unsightly, they're a snagging hazard with the cup-holders underneath them and a dog frequently in the car. It's neither fun nor safe to have your cellphone yanked into your lap by its charging cable while you're going at 45 MPH because your dog wanted to put a friendly paw on your hip to say "Hello."

I've been putting up with this rat-nest for awhile, but I finally decided this weekend to stop putting and start hacking. I put together a simple hack to tame the wire-beast on my dashboard. Excluding planning and part procurement, it took no more than ten minutes. Here's how it went down.

Preparation

As a first-pass solution, I grabbed some velcro ties (tip from Momma Tomczak: never run out of velcro ties) and gathered the wires into one coil. That was already an 80% solution, but I didn't like the idea of supporting the weight of the wires solely by their sockets (the audio wire in particular; I'm on my third one of those because they keep breaking from too much pressure at the point of contact into the radio).

Taking a look under my console, I learned that I was in luck: screws! Thank you, 2000 Honda Civic!

Taking a quick trip down to Lowe's, I browsed the hardware aisle for a few minutes and found my new favorite area: the hobby parts drawers (which are basically "Replacement parts for your Erector set"). I fished around and settled upon these little beauties: ⅜" Natural Nylon Clamps. Picked them up for a little over a buck and headed home.

Ten-Minute Hack

There wasn't quite enough room to get the electric drill in between the cup-holders, gearshift, and lower console, so I settled for a manual screwdriver (actually, I, uh, manually used the screwdriver drill bit from my DeWalt drill... Don't tell my high-school mentors). I slipped the nylon clamps in between the screws and the console, and screwed them down until they felt solid. It should hold (which comes from the same engineering lexicon as the software test theory of "It Probably Works," but hey, ten minutes spent). Rather than thread the wires through the clamps, I threaded the velcro ties through the clamps to make it easy to swap out or rearrange the wires.

Final Thoughts

I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. Minimally-invasive, and it's really cleaned up the problem. There's a bit more slack in the cable leading to the AUX jack than I'd like, but the way to fix that is to find a right-angle headphone jack plug so I'm not extending an inch out of the radio unnecessarily. I'm confident that this solution should clean up my snagging issues.

One minor issue remaining is that when nothing is plugged into the charger or stereo cables, they don't stay in the cupboard easily and have a tendency to dangle. I may get a stick-on wire holder to affix to the left lower side of the console to stow those when they aren't in use, but that's a minor issue compared to having wires snake around my cup-holders continuously.

Yay, ten-minute hacks!