The Plug: Part 2

It's about time. After a month I finally manned up and cut open my SmartStrip plug. The goal is to splice the plug to a recepticle on the exterior of the rear panel of the cabinet. I'm still a little nervous about this process but I'm reasonably positive (99%) that I did this safely and correctly.

I bought a plastic box at Home Deopt for $2 and the idea is to completely seal off the wiring block and any chance of someone touching a live wire. The wire from the SmartStrip goes in one end and the wires from the plug recepticle go in the other - pretty basic stuff. This is about as safe as I think I can make it.

Here's the box:

And here is kind of sort of what I'm trying to accomplish... actually, I don't even know why I took these pictures but here you go:

Here's the exciting "before" picture of the plug. Wow.

And here is the "after" shot. It was like ripping off a band-aid. I just closed my eyes and made the cut with my trusty utility knife.

At this point there was no turning back. Inside, there were three wires representing positive (white), negative (black) and ground (green). The next step was stripping each of these wires to expose about 1/4" of the interior copper wire. Thie next picture shows the three wires (but not stripped).

I matched these wires up to the wires in the wiring block that spacies from BYOAC set up for me. All I really had to do was screw them into the wiring block attached to the plug recepticle. This is how it ended up before I closed the plastic box:

Here are the final shots of everything all closed up:

I'm not totally finished with this (I should be tonight) and I plan on wrapping the wiring block in electrical tape before closing up the plastic box for good. Also, the last thing I want to do is somehow cover the back of the plug recepticle with either electrical tape or some sort of foam - I can still see metal sticking out and I can only assume that once the cabinet is plugged in it will be "hot" all the time whether the computer is on or off.

I want to be sure 1000% sure that there is zero chance of something going wrong or someone getting hurt. My daughter is only 3 and she's curious. If she managed to open up the door on the front and crawl inside I don't want to have to worry about her getting hurt.

That's all for now.