Since
we had about a zillion connections to make we had to invent a whole wiring
standards system to handle it. Each way of terminating a connector was a
"connector detail" and each way of preparing a cable for a termination
was a "prep spec". Check it out... we used old fashion lacing twine
instead of tye raps! (It was less bulky)
Each
prep and connector detail was photographed and duplicated for the crews. We had
about 20 people in our shop working for about 8 months and two subcontractors
who we sent patch bay assemblies to.
This series of photos takes you on a journey from the patchbay at the top of the stairs in the west local machine room, under the floor, through the cable tray, and up onto the cross connect wall. 35 patch bays, each with 96 points, with full normals brought out are represented. Each cable set from Ultrapatch panel to Elco connector was prefabricated off site.
Well, we wanted to buld as much off site as possible. Since all cables were multipair (4, 8, 16, or 26), all connectors were either elco or ultrapatch, and the topology was complicated, we frequently had multiple cables in a connector, for example 4 x 4pair cables in an elco 56. Then we had connections between the local cross connect walls, the console patch (located in the credenza) and the back of the consoles themselves (SSL 5K). The elcos on the back of the console patch bays had top and bottom rows on the same elcos. So to prefabricate this mess, if you figured it out, it was all one huge net of a cable web. Steve Sutter wrote an incredible program in clipper which went through the entire wirelist and figured out, on a cable and connector basis, what the most logical way to split up the assemblies was so that they could actually be built. He called it "nodebreaker" and it saved us a ton of time because it was actually impossible to figger it out manually.
Rear of the console 
Console
patch bays
Speaking of wire, Belden Wire and Cable produced a very informative article about Skywalker Ranch to highlight the use of 500 miles of custom cable they produced for DCE. "David Carroll Electronics Low Capacitance Audio Cable" is printed on it every 18 inches, so if you figure 500mi x 5,280 ft/mi, divided by 12 (average pair count) that's 146,000 times! [1MB PDF file]