Flex cables - sometimes nightmare for DIY

I like to take appart anything that has electronics inside. I like seeing how it works. I also sometimes try to modifiy it, or just take out components that I need in my projects. That's how I end up with a large inventory of used electronic components and one of them is a big pile of flex cables. These are commonly found in any modern electronic system like scanners, printers and many other hardware.

You probably think, what on the world will I do with so much flex cables? In diy projects they are useless because of the limitations of our home tools in soldering. Well I do admit I rarely use them in my DIY projects, but when it comes to repairing some other hardware they do come in handy... 

Sometimes happens that flex cables ware out, because of constant streching and bending. One example of this is in the CD player where a flex cable is used to connect electronics with a laser and a pick up sensor. Now you could go and find a brand new one on ebay, but the most likely part is that you will not find it or it will be ridiculously expensive.

When it comes to that, I go and check my big pile of flex cables for the same or more number of wires and IMPORTANT - SAME PITCH SIZE.

I found one cable from Sony that met my application.

Now we have to cut this cable to meet our applications number of wires. I needed 16 wires, but as you can see from the picture bellow, there are 17 wires. This is becase the width of the cable must also meet our application and that means that we will have one extra wire that we will slightly trim to fit in our connector. This does not cause any problems in our system and so we can leave it the way it is.

Now we have to cut it to the same length on one end.

Now comes the tricky part. We must remove the isolaton to expose the wire. I found that this is best done with a fine wire mesh on my power tool. Tape the wire down with some duct tape and carefully grind down plastic isolation. 

When you are done it should end up looking like this:

Now all I we have to do next is glue a peace of hard plastic on to the lower part of the wire with some super glue and trim down the exces.

It does not look pretty I know that, but it gets the job done. I used it to repair a CD player from Teac and it worked perfectly. I also suggest that the end that we have made, is used in our application where it is least under stress. That is why I plugged my DIY end in the main board of CD player and the other industrial made endto the laser module, where it will undergo  a bit more stress in bending.

If someone knows a better way to remove the plastic isolation from a flex cable I would really appreciate it if you leave a comment.