Keep a Roll of "something" Neat and Tidy.

OK, this may not be the most technical of an Instructable you have ever seen. But it may save you some frustration.

Have you ever had a newly purchased roll of wire, cable, tubing or something that you don't normally want to have unraveled all the way? Then have the "retail" packaging make it difficult, if not impossible to remove pieces as you need them? In my case, the retail wrap was basically electrical tape. It made it tough to remove pieces of this tubing from the roll.

I wanted to find a way to prevent having a 100' roll of micro-drip-irrigation-tubing unroll all at once. I found a way to stop that entire roll from coming unraveled but yet let me pull off pieces as I need them.

I happen to work in the IT world, so I have many of these Velcro type ties. What I did was wrap the roll of tubing with these ties close to the same place as the retail packaging wraps were.

You can use anything that can secure the roll from unraveling. I've use "zip ties", scrap electrical wire or left over twist ties. In this case, I just happened to have these Velcro ties.

After placing your ties, remove the retail ties.

Now you can remove pieces of the product as needed without having the entire roll come loose. And unlike the retail ties, these Velcro wraps can be adjusted as the roll gets smaller, as can any other non-tape-like tie.

Hope this helps.

I may be the only person who has never thought of this before, but in the past I have always unwrapped the roll of whatever, THEN decided to put my own tie around it. But the roll was loose and kinds of a mess. I prefer the factory version of the roll. They tend to be neater and I am kind of OCD about that stuff. :-)