Wiring is easy. Just a bunch of wires connecting from plug A to B.
Right?
Well, you are just partially correct. Yes, making a wiring is just a fancy term of connecting plug/pin A to B. The idea behind wiring is just to electrically connect two points to each other, but greatly varies on the application.
To make a good wiring, it is far from just connecting terminals and bunch up the wires. Each and every wiring that we sell are handmade. In this post we try to capture the steps and some work in the background of each wiring.
The main difference between making a bunch of wires and a wiring loom is document.
Here is how we make a club level wiring loom:
1. Design
To make repeatable wiring document, we start with overall design on a computer program.
The main concept at this stage is to make sure you've got all the parts needed laid down before doing anything.
Get to know how many pins, pin sizes, and what pin goes where. If there are any splices, document them now.
Finished document might look something like this:
Wiring document should contain at least but not limited to layout, bill of material, wiring cutlist, and wiring table/diagram.
Now that we know how long to cut the wires, what parts are needed, and the main layout of how the wiring will look like finished.
2. Prepare
Normally at the start of making the wiring, the tools are not all laid out yet. They will come in at stages.
In picture here we only need the connectors, pen, vernier, and a tape measure.
We then cut the wires as per the cutlist. In this example loom we only need 5 main wires.
At the top left of the picture, you'll see something like colorful beads. Those are colored heat shrink tubes. We use it for wires identification, color-coding.
Each wire are then color coded according to the wire number in the document.
Then each of the wires are routed on to the fixture. This makes sure that every wire are cut to length.
When all the wires are in position, we cut the heat shrink to length for each of the wire branch.
Now we're ready to tidy up the wires.
3.Sheath, branch, terminate
To make the wiring able to withstand pulling and twisting around, we chose to concentric twist them. The main reason why we chose concentric twisting, at this wiring level, is that it is circular and rounded nicely.
This is how it looks like when all the wires are twisted and ready for sheating. The twisting should be consistent throughout the length.
When all the twisting is done, we sheath it with heat shrink and terminate the ends of the wires to terminals.
Here is a quick video of how we do it.
3.Dimension check
Here is how it looks like when done.
This is how many tools we ended up using.
And this is the end result:
This is a brief look into how we design and make each wiring loom. There are some steps that were not detailed in this post, we'll try to capture them in the next posts.
Enjoy!
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