Best Way to Hang Hose and Cords

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. I've got a quick tip for you today that's a little device you can make that you can use to hang hose and cordage that is a lot better design than what you can buy at the store and the economics are better too. Stay tuned and I'll show you what I mean. Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. Thanks for joining me today. You know, you're going to have around your household a lot of hoses, whether they're air compressor hose, irrigation hoses, and perhaps cordage such as electrical cords that all benefit from being stowed correctly. A common way is to coil them up but, you know, trying to stow them or hang them up well, that can be problematic and you can buy devices at your favorite hardware store like this cable cuff which looks like one half of a set of handcuffs that are used to reach around these types of things and you would simply clasp around it put this in and now you've got this thing that holds it together. Well, a couple of things that I think we can improve upon and you can quickly do in your own shop. One, notice that when we put this together it's not real handy to carry. You've got a little bit of a carry area but it's only moderate diameter and there's not a lot for the average hand to get around and to grasp it well to carry even a moderate amount of weight. Secondly, you're restricted by the diameter of the device. You can't put a lot of material in there and number three, it's plastic. It's not going to carry a lot of load. What to do? Well, it's really easy. Instead of doing this type of device, my device and I think one that you should really consider using is a toggle cable cuff like this. Now, why we call this a toggle is it using a piece of dowel or wood stock like this that actually gets put back through the loop and then toggled or turned sideways so that you have a set of loops around the material you're stowing. So, what that would look like in use is I'm going to put it around this set of or this roll of air compressor hose. I'm simply going to put it back to itself, pull up and now I have this being stowed this way. Now, why is this superior? For a couple reasons. Number one, you can really get a grasp on it and carry a lot of weight. Number two, you don't have to be restricted to one of these. You could actually put multiple hoses in here and as you can see in this photo, that's exactly what we do when it comes time at the end of the season where we stow all of our commercial irrigation hoses, the black rubber hoses. We stack them, go ahead and put multiple ones in the same cuff and it makes it a lot easier and because the handle is sizable enough for my man hand, then I can carry a significant load up to 50 pounds on each side easily. So, this is a superior way to go. Now, what does it take to make these? Now, you may look at this and say, well, that's so easy. Why are we wasting our time explaining it? Because there's a little tip here that I want to pass on that I'll show you in just a moment of why we have that unusual knot at the top of the toggle. All right, let's take a look and let's go ahead and build one of these very quickly. Here, I have a piece of one and a quarter inch dowel. Now, I actually prefer this larger dowel over the smaller and this is about one inch dowel but it's what I happen to have at the time simply because it fits in the hand better and you can really grasp on it. You could also use closet rod if you wanted to, whatever you prefer. This section happens to be five inches long. I drilled a five inch hole in the end. I touch sanded the ends and chamfered them. As you can see, it's not perfect for crying out loud. It's a cord hanger so it's not a piece of furniture but I'm going to knock off the edges on it so it isn't going to splinter me and then I also did the same thing in the openings where this came through. Well, there is the handle. Now, if you want to to make it last longer, you could certainly spray varnish it just to bump up its durability but that's not necessary. So, that's part one. Part two, I like to use this kind of rope here. It's what's called a diamond braid nylon rope and the reason I like using this kind of rope is that it is soft and it is very pliable and so it's not going to lay stiffly and it is easy to work with, not highly abrasive. I like to cut lengths of approximately 24 inches long to give me some distance here to add additional items in the same loop but also that gives me a good place if I'm going to hang it on a spike in the storage barn to give plenty of room around this to do so and let them hang down on top of each other especially when you're doing multiple stacks on the same spike. So, let's go ahead and the first thing we're going to do is we're going to cut right at 24 inches here and or you can go a little bit longer. In this case, I think because I'm building a bigger one, I actually will go ahead and do the three foot but you can adjust the way you want. So, there's our three foot right there. We'll go ahead and trim that and let's go ahead and burn the ends. Okay, after you've secured the ends by burning them and rolling down the fibers there, now you can make use of it. Now, if you simply put it through the toggle and tie a bulky knot on the end of it here and I'm not going to do that, then that's fine. It won't come off this end but it'll come off that end, right? It'll just pop off. Well, that's useless. So, you've got to come up with a way to keep the toggle handle at the top end and this is how I accomplish that. I simply put through the two ends through in this case a five-eighths inch hole. I loop each one around and come back up through again so that a tail comes out the top but now there is a secured side on that. I'm going to step and repeat for the other side as well. All right, so now we have our second tail through. You're going to go ahead and pull right here and now you've got two tails up the top. Let's go ahead and put that into a nice square knot to secure it. So, we're going to go like that and like that and now we have this nice square knot on the top that's securing everything. That'll take a lot of pressure and now you have a loop which you can go back through. Now, that is a short loop but you can certainly make it a lot longer. As you can see, that was 36 inches of material. By the time you tie it off, it uses up pretty quickly. So, depending on what you're trying to accomplish, you could start with 42, 48, a bit longer but for illustration or demonstration purposes, we use this short amount. Well, now that you've got it like this, again if you wanted, you could burnish this a little bit to tie it down. Now, that will not slide down. It's secured and now you can do just like this around an item and now you have a great toggle that'll hold these on. Cheap, fast, and a much better design using common materials. You can find either what you already have or at your local hardware store. If you have a device or some kind of tip like this you'd like to share with your fellow readers, why don't you do so in the comments below and if you found this video to be helpful, won't you like it and even better yet, won't you subscribe to our channel and make sure you ring the bell so you'll get notified every time we put out a new great video about the shop, tips like this, horticulture, Maggie's Kitchen, truck life, and other product reviews. Hey, thanks for watching. Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jake from DirtFarmerJake.com