Disclosed is an optical cable manufacturing method, comprising the following steps: 1) performing cooling and drying processing on an optical cable output by a sheath extrusion mechanism; 2) performing defect detection on a sheath of a dried optical cable, and when it is detected that the sheath has a defect: clamping two sides of a defective region with a clamp; enabling a cutter to sleeve a non-defective region of the sheath, and controlling the cutter to move in an axial direction of the sheath to remove a convex portion of the sheath; and performing secondary defect detection on the sheath; and 3) coiling up the optical cable. According to the manufacturing method, when it is detected that a sheath has a defect, a defective convex portion of the sheath can be cut away on-line; this manufacturing method can prevent later processing of a sheath of an optical cable and effectively improves the optical cable production efficiency; after the defective convex portion is removed, an outer diameter of the sheath is subjected to secondary detection; when a defect is detected, the defect is recorded, and the region can be processed later; and this method can prevent the product quality from being influenced when a cutting operation goes wrong.