On Tuesday, June 9, 2015 at 10:35:55 PM UTC-5, rbowman wrote:
On 06/09/2015 10:00 AM, Uncle Monster wrote:
When you're spending 8 hours a day working with bundles of #14 stranded wire as big around as your arm, you'll want an automatic stripper. The wires aren't stripped in close quarters inside the panel, the wire bundles are prepped while hanging outside of the panel. When you have a complicated system that may have connection changes made during the installation, the wires aren't run straight to the terminal with little or no slack.

Maybe in you world. We laid out the panels with Panduit wire duct
separating the banks of octal relay bases. First the intrarelay wiring
was done. Strip the end of the 16 gauge MTW, screw it to the terminal on
the base, run it to the correct relay, cut, strip, and screw it down.
For the pushbuttons, selector switches, Eagle Signal timers and so for
mounted in the doors, they would be harnessed up, the bundle run into
the duct, and then connected to the relay bases as needed.

My techs could use anything they wanted but after wrestling with
automatic strippers, they gravitated to Ideal T-5's.

The panels I refer to are six feet tall, mounted to a wall and the bundles of wire were hanging out of 2-1/2" conduit. The wires were all stripped and left hanging so test equipment could be connected to verify the location of the device or sensor at the other end of the wires so the wires could be labeled. A stripper like a T-5 was used at the device end in the other areas where only two to four wires needed to be trimmed, labeled and stripped for connecting. Using an Ideal Industries Stripmaster Wire Stripper was a quick and easy way for me to go through a large bundle of wires because it was easy to position each wire for stripping so they were all uniform. No connections were made until all wires were stripped, locations determined and labels applied. Laying out panels in a shop where one wire at a time is installed is someplace I too prefer to use a T-5. Oh yea, I'm quite fond of Panduit wire duct and their other products to use when building control panels or network racks. I really miss being able to do what I consider to be interesting work. ^_^

[8~{} Uncle Wire Monster