Adamranders, your cable is just great, looks more natural than mine. Did you do it with deformers? Pls provide some info

looks good man, glad you found a fairly efficient and clearly inexpensive way to do it.
I'm interested to see what you do with them now.

Oh and for efficiency sake wouldn't it be a lot easier to just model the wire where you see it? You don't need the copper through the whole visible geometry as it would be shielded. I mean normally utp wire as an outer shielding which prevents you from seeing the twist until you expose pairs, and you cannot see copper until you strip the wire.

Keep that in mind or your geometry will start to tank you.

The copper is extruded along the same path so it's no extra effort to do, two clicks actually. All components must be visible, copper thread included, it's gonna be a layered pic in flash where you can turn off insulation layers and see what's inside.
I had to rebuild the thing, an engineer buddy said the coil density was way too high. So it looks more realistic now. Lighting is default, looks cheap i know but i had enough.

the first two images are one i did in the same manner you were originally trying just with my trig applied to correct the deformation. the third is with the plugin and it only took about 5 min to make even with refining the twist and how close the wires layed to each other. your cable is coming along great though, keep up the good work and continue to post with you're progress, and never hesitate to ask questions, some ppl may give you crap for asking Q's that they think you should know , but they just don't remember the difficulties of trying to learn, everyone here is here to help as a community. again keep up the good work!