Wrenchin’ Wednesday: Zip-tie origami organizes your sparkplug wires

You can tell a lot about a person and their car by the details under the hood. Whether the machine is placed on the parking lot pedestal at a show or down in the trenches with the road warriors, one of those tell-tales is how well organized the spark plug wires are. If your wires are bundled around the distributor like a flying spaghetti monster, drooping its tendrils dangerously close the exhaust, there’s a quick and cheap zip-tie hack to lay them out cleanly. Beyond just having a tidier look, you can use these organizers to easily bundle spark plug wires and even keep fuel and coolant lines away from moving parts.

1. Lay your plug wires out in order, and rap them in one large ziptie first. Only click it down a few times, for now.

2. Now, take another ziptie, and run it around the outside first ziptie between each pair of plug wires. Again, keep them loose for now.

3. You’ll need a ziptie for every plug wire (or hose), but once you get your bundle ready, it should look something like this. You’ll want the tail of every ziptie in the same direction, and get the bundle into its final position before pulling the zip-ties down.

4. The trick is to pull them down evenly until they’re snug enough to hold everything straight. With everything in its final place, trim the tails off (preferably with your own DIY flush cutters) and marvel at your work.

The best part about this is that it can scale up and down with the size and number of things you’re bundling together, so it’s a versatile way to organize many systems throughout your project.