Wire labeling

Use white electrical tape instead of masking. If you carefully cut the tape and fold it into a little flag on the wire, you can do pretty neat work.

Iggy Print the labels on your computer printer and use clear packing tape....it works for me! I use a laser printer so I think they might last longer than an ink jet.

Steve

The Brother P-Touch labelers work pretty well, particularly the PC based P-Touch 1500-PC. Brady makes a wire label printer, but it's bloody expensive.

Pete C.

Brady makes clear & white labels for this sort of thing. You write on the white part, which then gets put on the cable first, and the clear part wraps once or twice around that, protecting the lettering. Probably other people as well. Their website may have a cable label table.

Shrink tubing + felt tip pen.

Red is black and plus is minus. That always helps.

Nick

Yet another method: Use a Dymo label maker with several different colors of tape by making labels with each identifier specified twice (with several blanks in between) and then folding each label - around the wire - to make it double-sided.

Personally, I prefer the newer "LetraTag" type since it prints smoothly on wider tape which is more flexible. [It's a lot easier for my old eyes to read. ] It also lets me use both upper and lower case - unlike the older type.

Yes, there are at least 5 mfrs of these so-called self laminating wire markers. See the top of McMaster page 1816 for small packs. They're much cheaper per label in packages of printer sheets, but the packs start around $100, which is hard to swallow for a small job.

The snap-on markers in the middle of the page are nice, but expensive, and slow if you're marking many wires.

You can also get blank vinyl coated cloth labels like those at the bottom of the page that work well for hand marking with a sharpie.

Ned Simmons

I found out the hard way that P-Touch doesn't stick to P-Touch. You can't use the tape as a flag around a wire. It took a year, but everything I did fell off.

Consider using a P-Touch to make labels but put the label the long way on the wire then wrapping it in Scotch Magic tape.

Panduit makes nice sheet label stuff to do this but when i was buying it the smallest purchase was about a hundred bucks, but a phone call got some samples sent to me at my company address. hint hint.

It comes in lots of sizes.

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A tape labeler and clear heat shrink.

Make up a label and shrink the clear heat shrink to hold on the label.

Nice and cheap if you use paper label strips and a pen.

Bart D. Hull snipped-for-privacy@inficad.com Tempe, Arizona

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Ignoramus22440 wrote:

I guess I am dating myself but.. For small aircraft we used regular scotch brand transparent tape. Cut a strip of regular white paper about 1/8th wide then write name on the paper. Set this centered along the length of scotch tape onto the adhesive side. Take the Scotch tape piece and carefully lay it along the length of the wire then roll it around the wire. It takes a bit of skill and of course practice. The first few attempts are bad experiences but after a few practice labels you will get the idea. Randy

i

Dymo makes a special handheld printer for this sort of thing. There around

3 models ranging in price from $50 to $150 or so:

They will print on wrap-around wire labels, shrink tubing, or flat sheet for labeling stuff like patch panels. The labels are fairly expensive at $15 per roll & up.

I've recently purchased one of them to use, partially for labeling wires on machine tools or custom-built gadgets, but mostly to label the multitude of generic wall warts for the various electronic devices that have accumulated over the years.

Mike

According to Ignoramus22440 :

Well ... I don't know about "inexpensive", but back when I worked for Melpar (mid-early 1960s), and they built (among other things) flight simulators, they had a machine which you could run the wire through, and it would stamp about every six inches an identifying number or word. They even had small enough type so they used it on 22 gauge stranded white insulated wire, so they could identify it in a complex laced cable run.

The machine used heated metal type, and a Mylar film ribbon coated with something probably not too different from laser printer toner.

You could probably make a holder for movable metal type (steel, not lead alloy) which would mount on a soldering iron, and print from something reasonable. I would suggest trying something like the film ribbons for old Selectric typewriters or Diablo Hytype daisywheel printers. See how well they transfer and bond with heat.

The same machine was also used to stamp white vinyl insulating sleeving, and IIRC, it might be usable as a shrink sleeving. I remember that they used to put a bunch of cut lengths of that into a small bottle of lacquer thinner, and they would swell up. They would then slip one over something to be insulated, and when it dried, it would shrink back.

I don't remember whether they ever did this swell and shrink trick with printed ones, however.

Good Luck, DoN.

Go by an electrical supply - and you can get a booklet of number tapes. Pre numbered and pre cut - just peal out a number...

Just make a table - #10 is SCR1 pin 2. Then leave them on afterwards - mark the numbers in the docs or include your table.

Martin

Martin Eastburn @ home at Lions' Lair with our computer lionslair at consolidated dot net NRA LOH & Endowment Member NRA Second Amendment Task Force Charter Founder IHMSA and NRA Metallic Silhouette maker & member

Ignoramus22440 wrote:

Iggy, I have used these "scothccode" labels alot. You write on it, and when you wrap it around the wire there is a clear part that overlaps and protects the part you wrote on. They work great, and under 30 bucks.

example here:

-Al A.

It's probably no help, but my favorite is to put the labels in a spreadsheet, dump it to the Brady software, and send it to by Brady TLS-2200. Usually, I print it on the heat shrink sleeves.

Pete Keillor

Thatnks to all. I bought some long adhesive labels that I would write on, peel off and then fold in half around the wire.

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