Cable Tracker

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We buy small quantities for prototyping and then let purchasing do the grunt
work for production.

Mouser will sell you four foot sticks of the stuff in all sizes from 1/16 "
to 4" in any of 6 colors for about a buck fifty each, you pay postage.
Shipping time is almost always less than a week. You slice and dice the
little buggers from the large stick.

See www.mouser.com and then the 5174 series in the upper left hand corner of
page 1027. You might also want to look at digikey to see if they have
anything similar. www.digikey.com

It shrinks with a hair dryer, any temperature above boiling water. The
shrink is almost exactly 50%; a stick bought as one-half inch i.d. will
shrink down to one-quarter inch.

As a refinement of the prior message for a "system", you can identify the
"lead digit" several ways. One is with a double-wide piece of shrink (or
two stacked so close together that there is no mistake of your intent, OR,
you always read from the wire END out, OR, you sacrifice the white color and
read from the white end always, OR .... use your noggin.

I prefer a 3 and 4 "digit" breakout. 3 digit for unspecified wires and 4
digit for specific wires. For example, wires going to the dimmer control
are 3-digit (primary power, control, etc.), but 4-digit departing for the #1
radio, 4-digit to the panel floods, etc..

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One last plea ... I wrote all this stuff up in a Kitplanes article several
years ago. Honest to gesundheit I don't have the time to keep my web page
up with all the articles, although each one of them is in a separate zip
file with all the photos and such. If some kind person is willing to keep
the web page up, then all one of you kind newsgroup denizens would have to
do is go to the web page and there is the article, available for download,
and we could all review it and bring it up to date.

THere are about six years worth of columns. It takes about two hours to
format, check, write the index page, and such for each article. If one of
you kind gentlemen or ladies would like to do one or two a week, in a year
we'd have them all done and up to date. Any takers?

www.rstengineering.com/kitplanes
***************************************

Jim

--
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought
without accepting it."
--Aristotle


"Peter Dohm" wrote in message
...

wrote in message
...
On Jan 1, 4:24 pm, "Peter Dohm" wrote:

I really like this idea, especially the colored heat shrink version
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Do you know a good source of small quantities of the required colors?

Writing on white (or at least, light colored) Heat Shrink is a pretty
good way of identifying the lead.

-Bob