On Fri, 29 Oct 2010 14:06:42 -0400, Brian Lawson
wrote:

On Thu, 28 Oct 2010 13:43:13 -0500, Karl Townsend
wrote:

About the time my old 'puter crashed and burned, I asked about tracing
wire from an operator panel to find each wire's function. I lost the
replies to this post, sorry. The job has changed slightly as we're
trashing the old panel and building a new one.

Anyway, I now have a comparitively easy job of wringing out two fifty
conductor cables. I could just pull in multi color cable and be done
with it, but I'm a cheap a$$.

Anyway, I remember somebody had a quick and nifty way to wring out
wires when you have both ends of a cable without markings. How, again?

Karl



Hey Karl,

I've handled a lot of multi-wire cables up to 60 wires (there might be
as many as five that size on an elevator), and have never seen one
that didn't have one of either number or colour coding of some kind on
the insulation/jacket of each individual wire. Some wires used a
colour and a "mark", say wires of orange or yellow or black or white
or blue,or,or,or,or,or,or, plus either a solid stripe or dash or dot
( eg..blue wire with no stripe, blue wire with solid stripe, blue wire
with dashed "stripe", blue wire with "dots" stripe ), giving an ID for
the 4 blue wires for example.

Have you looked closely at the cable for one of those methods? Solid
colour coding is very obvious, mixed imprint colour coding is tougher
(which of the two colours is the colour and which is the marker
colour??) and on smaller wires, below 18 gauge, the number writing
gets REALLY small.

One thing about the cables using printed numbers on the jacket, it
usually made it easier for colour-blind guys. Usually! It's a real
crap-your-drawers moment when you hook a few hundred connections up on
the car top, and when you get to the machine room and ask how your
helper is doing he answers
" OK. No problem. Ummmm.. How do you know if this one is a black
wire with with a white tracer, or a white with a black tracer?"

Jeeezzzzuuusss.

Take care.

Brian Lawson,
Bothwell, Ontario.

Or the story an instrument man told me: he was trying to troubleshoot
a large panel with loads of connections in spring terminals. Looking
at wire markers, everything looked in order. As soon as he removed a
wire, though, he found that none of them had been stripped.

I'd have made sure that guy was gone for good.

Pete Keillor