Cockpitbuilders.com

Been looking at a bunch of the wiring pics for your panels and went "EEEK!" as if it was me I would lose track of the wiring after 2 weeks.

You see, I have this common problem called Red/Green colour blindness that a lot of males suffer from. As Cockpit Building is primarily a male occupation I would have thought that more people would have tagged their wires for later modifications.

You see, I use multiple colour wires and I get confused even with phone wires... I tend to use primary coloured wire most of the time and use a slip on number tag (or did when I was building my home automation system mark 3... I went RF in mark 4 so it was less of a problem).

If you use the wire tags it makes wiring diagrams a lot more use for if something needs changing years down the road. For example I had one wire pinched somewhere and I traced it through the skirting boards because each wire had a tag every few feet and used a pin and a multimeter to find the break in the correct wire. Now if I hadn't tagged the wires it would have meant a lot more hassle.

Now I do know there are new fangled wire checking multimeters that help do it for you but they are expensive generally. That's when I realised that you could probably mod a LAN wiring tester to do the same thing (because they are pretty much the same thing anyway). Not perfect but it does help with data wiring (like switches on a home cockpit).

I still tag wires when I need to (because it is easier to follow on a wiring diagram years later even).

How do you guys loom these days... ie how do you keep your wiring tidy? I was taught the old, old continuous lacing method. I see a lot of people use cable ties these day (as it's a lot quicker). Problem is, when you need to access a wire that is loomed with cable ties it is really easy to cut the other cables too, it seems to me.

Sorry if I am asking a lot of questions... When I research I tend to log everything heh... "Prior Planning Provides P*** Poor Performance" and all that. I tend to spec out each problem area and make sure it all works out in my head. Thank god for FreeMind is all I can say.

Cutting edge of the dike always faces to the outside of the cable when removing zip ties.

Stock up on zip ties is all I can say. Tying the traditional way makes for a great looking cable but it's not so great if you have to start checking wires or adding to the cable.

You know that NASA actually use spot ties now (they used to use the old method that I mentioned).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cable-lacing-nasa-style-spot-ties.jpg

That actually is harder to do than marine hitching. I wonder why they don't use cable ties...  :huh: