Paracord is nylon rope that is used for parachutes. Folks shorten “Parachute cord” into paracord. Other folks call it 550 cord because it can hold 550 pounds before it breaks. Even though it can hold up all those pounds and used in parachutes, it’s not recommended for rock climbing.
I have learned how to tie some cool knots with this nylon rope and I’ve seen how people use it to add a little more to a knife handle. Now I have used it to wrap a busted USB drive.
A piece of the plastic case around my 4 GB Kingston DataTraveler USB drive broke. So, I broke it off the rest of the way with a pair of pliers. Sorry guys, I don’t have a picture of that. Here’s the naked drive:
I thought about encasing the drive in a clear resin, but decided that I did not want to purchase a large quantity of resin that I might not use again. So I did the next best thing and wrapped it with paracord. Someone did this in an instructable, using a braiding technique with his. Mine is just a simple wrap like people do with knife handles. I tried doing it his way, determined that the braiding added too much bulk to the drive, and settled on a simple wrap.
I did not want to just wrap it with cord and call it done. I wanted to retain the LED light. So I took a clear plastic peanut butter jar and cut a piece out of it to redirect the light.
Before I glued it in, I tried to cover up some of the exposed metal with some black duct tape:
I wrapped it once and decided that I wanted to conceal the edges better. So I glued some gutted cord around the drive. I may have overdone it with the rubber bands holding it on. I hope you guys don’t negative rep me:
Now that the edging was in place, I could glue the clear plastic piece to the drive. This time I used a C-clamp:
Then I decided to cover it up with some more of the black duct tape:
And finally, the wrap:
I wanted to see if the clear plastic from the peanut butter jar would do the job of redirecting the light:
It’s not as bright as I hoped it would be, but at least it is visible. I tested it without putting the black duct tape on it and the green light barely showed up. Covering the plastic with duct tape helped it show up better. A lot of these flash drives are made without LED’s now. I guess it’s because SD cards do not have them. I like to see the LED light up when I use the drive.
Before I cut the excess cord, I decided that I kind of wanted a loop at the end so that I could hang the drive up. We do this at work with flash drives:
Tying a simple knot at the end added too much bulk to the drive, so I thought I could sew or tape the cord together to make a loop at the end. Then I had the brilliant idea to just burn cord together. That did not turn out that well and I ended up just cutting the end completely off. Sorry guys. I did not get a picture of that ugliness, but I do have the final product:
If I really want a loop at the end, I can always remove the wrap and do it over. Or, bust open another old flash drive and do the whole project again. Maybe this time I could use some plastic that is thicker than a peanut butter jar to help the LED stand out more.
This was an easy little project to do. Most of you could do something like this very quickly. It took me a few days because I have very little free time. I guess it gave the glue plenty of time to dry.
