Friday, January 18, 2013

Wire Labeling SNAFU

Yesterday, in an effort to put off working in the cold shop for one more day, decided to spend a little time with the electrical schematic and draw in the wiring for the landing light to be installed in the left wing along with adding a couple of tables identifying the wires for the AeroLESs landing and nav/strobe lights. It will be time well spent.

While perusing the schematic, decided to break out the label printer and make a bunch of heat shrink wire labels in advance. Of course, some wires have the same wire run number, but appear in multiple places. One such example: The strobe sync wire is the same wire number in both wings and the fuselage. Being lazy, I thought since I’ve already typed the wire name into the label maker, may as well print out heat shrink labels for all the termination points while the wire run name is in the label maker. Saves time retyping all the names later … great idea in theory!  However, I ran out of heat shrink tubing before getting all the wire runs needed for the left wing printed out … and I did not have a spare cartridge because I was not sure how well the Dymo label maker would work on heat shrink tubing, so only purchased one cartridge the first place.    BRILLANT, ... JUST BRILLANT!!!!

To my defense, I knew the standard label cartridge contained around 18 feet of vinyl labeling material. So it never occurred to me that the heat shrink cartridge has ONLY 5 feet of heat shrink tubing in it! Oh well, more is on order and should arrive Tuesday. In the mean time I can still run the wires through the wing rib wire grommets.

Speaking of wire grommets, test fitted the wiring with the larger 437-5 grommets that will be used on the innermost ribs passing the Tygon tubing. Happy to report there is plenty of room for both the shielded cables running to the landing light and nav/strobe light, along with the Tygon AOA tube plus the wire for the stall-warning indicator. There is no hint of binding or excessive friction and plenty of room for additional non-shielded wires. Once the temperatures get UP to 33 degrees (today’s predicted high), plan on trying to make a little progress in the shop by enlarging the rib grommet holes to 7/16” for those ribs which will have the Tygon tubing passing through them and snapping the 437-5 grommets in place and running some wire through the grommets.