Help Identifying piece for RJ-45 connector

July 29, 2014 3:33 PM

I've recently been terminating a bunch of cat 5 / rj45 connections. The connectors have been coming in these packets with this black piece that you put each individual wire through then cut the wires and put into the connectors. Anyways I want to purchase these black plastic pieces but I dont know what they are called. Can someone help me identify just this black plastic piece so that i can buy them? Here is a picture
posted by flipmiester99 to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

I've been wondering the same thing.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 3:41 PM on July 29, 2014

The black piece is called a "load bar". I'm not aware of anyone selling them separately from the main rj-45 housing they go into. And as far as I know there's no standardization for the dimensions of them, so you'd need to ensure you got extra load bar pieces that were matched to the rj-45 shell you're using them with. I'd guess generally they're sold together and considered cheap enough that if you break/lose one piece of the pair, you just toss the whole pair and use another.
posted by frontmn23 at 3:50 PM on July 29, 2014 [2 favorites]

Based on what frontmn23 said, it's probably a really bad idea to mix-and-match pieces, too, lest you get cables that work for awhile then crap-out.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 7:04 PM on July 29, 2014