wring 50 conductor cable

There were several ways. Mine:

Determine the outer covering and wire strip lengths for your connectors.

When you strip the wires only pull the insulation a short ways, leaving it on the wire so it doesn't fray but you have access to buzz them out.

Label one end 1 - 50. Also put on the J or P numbers while it's easy. I used Rhino printable heatshrink sleeving when the company demanded and paid for it.

Connect your buzzer to 1 and find the match on the other end. Label it and fold it back.

Repeat for 2 - 50.

jsw

Do you mean "ring" out? (The old way, before voltage sensitive semiconductor devices, involved a battery, a long wire, and an electric doorbell or buzzer -- thus the "ring". "Wring out" sounds like you are trying to get rid of water from it.

You could use a phone technician's "fox and hound" (one puts an electrical noise on the wire, and the other listens for it -- usually just by putting the probe near the wires outside the insulation.

Of course -- a *new* fox and hound would probably cost you as much as your color-coded fifty conductor cables, depending on length. (25-pair phone cable would work and be cheap -- except that it is solid wire, and not good for use where there is vibration.)

Do you have a digital multimeter? If so, does it have an audible beeper for continuity checks? Then -- just run a long wire from one side to the other end and have someone else handy to move that end while you are at your end. That should use low enough voltages and currents so it won't harm anything.

Good Luck, DoN.

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Cable Tracker

Description of Cen-Tech 94181

• Identify and trace electrical wires or cables without damaging insulation * Checks for short circuits and open circuits * Designed for use with telephone lines, alarm cables, computer cables, intercom lines, speaker wires, and thermostat wiring * Includes transmitter, receiver, #RJ11 telephone jack plug, two 9 volt batteries, users manual and carrying case

Ground wire length: 24-9/16", Tool dimensions: 15-5/16" L x 1-5/8" W x

15/16" T

The cords on the 1A2 phones were stranded, but only about six feet long. I still have some, somewhere. I parted out over 100 of thise phones a few years back and kept some of the bteer cables. Some have a

50 pin blue ribbon connector on one end & lugs on the other. The rest have set of mating male & a female 50 pin blue ribbon connectors.

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Thanks for that - it was like fingernails on a blackboard when I read it. When people ask me what I do for a living (I sometimes wonder myself), I often tell them I'm a master wire untangler.

Actually, each works in its own way. I had to "wring" out a cable in an F-4 Phantom jet. I was sitting in the cockpit, and there was a guy under the plane at the other end of the cable, and a third guy off to the side who would shout out which wire to check.

Kinda like wringing out a problem? :-)

I've also heard "buzz it out."

Cheers! Rich

AL WRITE GIES, I KANT SPEL !

Karl

SNIP

SNIP

Wring and ring sort of go hand in hand with this:

Ode to My Spell Checker

Eye halve a spelling checker It came with my pea sea. It plainly marks four my revue miss steaks eye kin knot sea. Eye strike a quay and type a word and weight for it to say Weather eye yam wrong oar write. It shows me strait a weigh as soon as a mist ache is maid. It nose bee fore two long and eye can put the error rite. Its rare lea ever wrong. Eye have run this poem threw it, I am shore your pleased to no. Its letter perfect awl the way. My checker told me sew.

Hey Karl,

I've handled a lot of multi-wire cables up to 60 wires (there might be as many as five that size on an elevator), and have never seen one that didn't have one of either number or colour coding of some kind on the insulation/jacket of each individual wire. Some wires used a colour and a "mark", say wires of orange or yellow or black or white or blue,or,or,or,or,or,or, plus either a solid stripe or dash or dot ( eg..blue wire with no stripe, blue wire with solid stripe, blue wire with dashed "stripe", blue wire with "dots" stripe ), giving an ID for the 4 blue wires for example.

Have you looked closely at the cable for one of those methods? Solid colour coding is very obvious, mixed imprint colour coding is tougher (which of the two colours is the colour and which is the marker colour??) and on smaller wires, below 18 gauge, the number writing gets REALLY small.

One thing about the cables using printed numbers on the jacket, it usually made it easier for colour-blind guys. Usually! It's a real crap-your-drawers moment when you hook a few hundred connections up on the car top, and when you get to the machine room and ask how your helper is doing he answers " OK. No problem. Ummmm.. How do you know if this one is a black wire with with a white tracer, or a white with a black tracer?"

Jeeezzzzuuusss.

Take care.

Brian Lawson, Bothwell, Ontario.

Or the story an instrument man told me: he was trying to troubleshoot a large panel with loads of connections in spring terminals. Looking at wire markers, everything looked in order. As soon as he removed a wire, though, he found that none of them had been stripped.

I'd have made sure that guy was gone for good.

Pete Keillor

BIG SNIP

Hey Peter,

As I said.......

Jeeezzzzuuusss.!!!!!!!

We had a lot of units that used maybe 100 to 150 AC relays on the panel and wires all with AMP manufactured solderless connectors crimped on from the factory, mostly fork type. Most are sorta "pilot duty" and don't carry much current. After 10 or 15 years, the wires break JUUUUSSSSTTT inside the crimp end of the AMPs, but the stranded wires have become brittle and stay right in place, so we get intermittent faults. Bitch to find!!

Never had the same trouble with T&B connectors.

Brian.

[ ... ]

Were these the ones without insulation -- just two sets of flags around the insulation and gripping the stripped wire (Type F) -- or the pre-insulated ones (P.I.D.G. -- "Pre Insulated Diamond Grip") which are a more stable insulation support. Normally, I've found the latter type to be very reliable over the years -- at least if crimped by AMP tools as designed.

Enjoy, DoN.

Good crimping tools should be periodically calibrated with a go nogo gauge. Long time ago I was working on a Convair 990 which had intermittent pa system audio. Traced the problem to a splice box under the galley. Every crimp was under crimped. I could pull out just about every wire. The coffee leaking from the galley and getting into the splice box didn't help either. Leaning back on the hydraulic tank that was just filled where I was working was an adventure. Skydrol is not the stuff to get on your skin. The guy that filled it sure was sloppy. Lucky there was a hose nearby to wash down my back.

John

SNIP

Hey DoN,

No insulation on the terminals, and no "flags" to support the wire. Plain old crimp style and using #18 (mostly) stranded wire. I have no idea how the factory crimped them.

Quick Google didn't get the AMP ones, but here's the "good" T&B Stakons

O.K. The ones without insulation -- and without support for the insulation just past the crimp area. Those really should not be used with wire subject to vibration. And I don't think that I have ever seen that style made by AMP -- or crimpers for them.

The ones which I prefer from AMP are the P.I.D.G. (expanded above) which have the crimp barrel inside an insulating sleeve which opens out in a bit of a funnel behind the barrel, and with a liner of copper or some other metal foil which is folded back on the inside rim of the funnel. When crimped, that foil grips the insulation so it does not pull back, and supports it against vibration, so the flex does not occur just past the barrel, leading to early failure.

The barrel and insulation, uncrimped, look sort of like this (use a fixed pitch font like Courier to view, to avoid distortion form the varying width of proportional characters):

______ \ \__________

The bare, uninsulated crimp terminals are generally suitable where the wires are securely supported close to the terminal end. I don't suggest those double-sided tape sticky pads intended to anchor cables, for an application where there is heat or oils present, but generally OK for normal temperatures in very clean equipment.

A secure anchor point near a terminal strip can be implemented by the addition of a single tapped hole near the terminal strip, for mounting various types of hardware (rubber covered cable clamp, for example).

Sometimes I've improvised an anchor point by placing a ring terminal under a terminal strip mounting screw, then running a tiny wire/zip tie thru the section where the wire would normally go, and then securing the wire(s) with the tie.

Those AMP uninsulated terminals that eventually fail may have been crimped too tightly. An airtight connection is ideal, but any tighter, and the dies are almost pinching the wire off like a cheap wire cutter does (excessive deformation of the conductor).

Some insulation grip should be included with uninsulated-type crimp terminals, even if it's just a quality shrink tubing of the proper size (double layered would be better), but then that's a lot of manual labor/time added to each connection.

In a proper installation, wires should have some sort of secure support near the terminals, although lots of installations simply secure the wires nearby, into a bundle with wire/zip ties without any anchor.

As mentioned, the PIDG AMP crimps have additional material in the terminals, to securely support the insulation of the conductor, and in critical applications, additional support is provided in close proximity to the terminals for strain relief and protection from vibration.

FWIW, some of the high reliability/aerospace crimps are referred to as W crimps, as the terminal is deformed from both sides by the dies, so that the cross-section of the actual electrical connection forms a W shape.