Homemade Conduit Rope Sleeve

You can make a conduit rope sleeve, too! The best conduit I've found is McMaster-Carr PN 8069K13 and is listed as "Liquid-Tight Flexible Metal Conduit, Ultra-Flex Grade" in the 3/4" size. I don't know the manufacturer of it. It's listed at $1.97/ft -- you can buy lengths as small as one foot and shipping from McMaster is pretty reasonable.

The end caps of the sleeve are a piece of a Thomas & Betts Liquidtight Connector assembly (PN 5333). The piece is called a "ground cone" (T&B PN 053-71814-123). The whole assembly goes for a little over $3.00. The electrical supply house in my town that carries T&B didn't sell the ground cones separately in small quantities -- I just bought the whole fitting and put the parts I didn't need in the junk drawer. I could have bought 100 ground cones for a little over $1.00/each.

A pair of these has supported at least 20 DdRT ascents this summer with no problems.

There are other options for both the conduit and end caps. I have successfully used 3/4" Type EF Liquidtight conduit from Alflex Corporation (now part of Southwire, it seems). It's not as flexible as the stuff from McMaster-Carr, but it was available at my local electrical supply house in 1 foot increments for about $1/foot.

I have also found an alternative end cap, which is shown in a picture in this set. The cap is a part out of a liquid-tight fitting assembly from the NEEM corporation (part #LMM-1). This style of cap seems more common to these type of fittings than the T&B ground cone. I found one of those caps shown in the photo at my local Lowe's for under $1.00 -- they had a bin box of just the caps. They all seem to fit just fine into the conduit. I've used these alternative fittings with the Alflex Type EF conduit on a climb or two and it worked out fine, although I like the black conduit better since it's more flexible.

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items are from between 11 Oct 2006 & 12 Oct 2006.