Practical Wiring - Club Level: Labelling
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Labelling
04.46
| 00:00 | - The process of labelling our wiring harness is the one of using a thermal printer to print labels onto heat shrink tubing which we're then going to recover onto the end of our harness sections. |
| 00:10 | Now while it might not be a strictly necessary part of the harness construction process, it is going to add a lot of professionalism to the look of your harness and it can make things easier when it comes to installing the harness in the engine bay. |
| 00:21 | Particularly with the harness we're working on on the bench here, which is for an FD3S RX-7, the primary and secondary injectors in the engine bay are very close to one another and they share a common connector, but they are very different flow rates. |
| 00:35 | So if those injector connections get mixed up, the engine is absolutely never going to run correctly. |
| 00:41 | So for this reason we absolutely are going to label this harness here, and we'll have a look at the process now in detail. |
| 00:46 | First part of that process is going to be determining the size of heat shrink label that we're going to have to print. |
| 00:52 | We do that simply by measuring our harness section here. |
| 00:55 | We're going to have a look at our boost control harness section and use it as an example. |
| 00:59 | So I'll go ahead and get a measurement of that diameter. |
| 01:05 | So we've got a measurement of approximately 4.5 millimetres there. |
| 01:09 | This means I'm going to choose the six millimetre diameter cartridge for our thermal printer as that's going to be the closest size we'll still recover down nicely to tightly grip our harness section. |
| 01:21 | So I've got our six millimetre cartridge installed in our printer here, just going to check the font settings. |
| 01:27 | Once again you want the font and any attributes applied to that font to be uniform across your harness, give all those labels the same look, just that uniform appearance that we are going for. |
| 01:38 | I know from experience that with this particular printer, the extra small font size with bold enabled gives a really nice looking label, so that's what we're going to go with. |
| 01:48 | The next step of the process is much as you would think, we're just going to punch in the label that we need which in this instance is going to be boost control or BCNT. |
| 01:56 | Now this label is going to match up to our harness connector documentation, which we have on our computer. |
| 02:03 | That means anyone that is diagnosing a problem with the vehicle and has access to that documentation is going to be able to identify that connector and how it was wired very very easily. |
| 02:13 | So I'm going to print that label out. |
| 02:20 | We can see we've got a nice looking label there. |
| 02:23 | However our thermal printer has left quite a lot of extra material on either end of the label which we're going to have to cut off as we don't want the label to actually be that long. |
| 02:33 | For this reason it's often a really good idea when you're printing out these labels for your harness, to do them in one long string with each label separated by a space, it's going to save you an awful lot of material. |
| 02:44 | For our example here though, I'm gonna go ahead and cut those extra sections off, making sure those cut nice and straight as we want the ends of those labels to be nice and perpendicular to the length of the harness. |
| 02:57 | Gonna get that label installed on our harness section now. |
| 03:00 | There's two key details you're looking for when you do that, and those are the direction that the text is facing and how far back you actually slide the label past the end of your DR25 or expandable braid sleeving if that's the route you've chosen to go. |
| 03:15 | Now these details are up to you and they're probably going to be somewhat application dependent. |
| 03:20 | But what you do want to ensure is that they are uniform across your harness. |
| 03:23 | So every harness section has its label the same distance from the end and that text is facing the same direction. |
| 03:30 | I'll get that label installed and I'm going to go for the label ending 30 millimetres before the end of our DR25 tubing there. |
| 03:40 | So I'll get that in place. |
| 03:43 | Gonna head over to the heat gun and get that recovered now. |
| 03:47 | We've got that harness section nicely labelled now. |
| 03:50 | But engine bays are fairly dirty environments and it's likely that text will actually rub off over time. |
| 03:56 | So we are going to give another layer to that to give it some protection. |
| 03:59 | We're going to do this using some clear heat shrink. |
| 04:01 | I'm gonna cut a section of clear heat shrink that will overlap this label by one millimetre on either end, we're gonna get that installed and then get it recovered down. |
| 04:20 | So you can see with our clear heat shrink recovered onto the harness there, it is protecting that label nicely. |
| 04:25 | Any dirt or grease that gets on there is gonna be able to be cleaned off and it's not gonna affect the text underneath at all. |
| 04:31 | Now once you get a label like this installed on the end of every section of your harness, it is going to give it that really nice professional look that we're going for, along with making it a wee bit easier to install in the engine bay. |
