Many-colored 22/24AWG stranded wire?

Never heard of such a thing. Even telco cables with >1000 pairs use a hierarchy of single and striped colors grouped in small bundles with colored tracers which are then grouped into larger bundles, etc...

Military and aerospace practice is to use all white with each wire marked every foot or so with a unique alphanumeric code.

Farnell do up to at least 60 core colour coded cable, so it looks like it might be possible.

If he buys some and strips it, he's almost there already! :)

--

John Devereux

[...]

I suspect military, aerospace and even telco are not dealing with $1-per-hour unskilled labor plugging the wires in... But the customer is always right. I did suggest using the ten standard solid colors, and grouping bundles by function.

I've seen all the colors I want in arcade games and car harnesses. I just can't find a supplier that has a rainbow catalog.

maybe alphawire... http://

/pages /375.CFM

waitwait, thats not unique coloring. sorry

Anixter shows about 60 colors for automotive GXL wire:

, "Wire and Cable" catalog, "GXL" under "Automotive". They also say they will dye and stripe wire to your requirements:

Standard disclaimer: I have no connection with Anixter other than as a user of some of their products.

Matt Roberds

You are looking in the wrong place.

Look for a place that process wire. They will custom stripe it for you. Check with a wire distributor. They should have some names.

There are place that will cut stripe, dye, and stripe wire to your spec.

What is he building? A kaleidascope.

Multi coUlred wire looms are just too hard.

Ask Boeing Lockheed etc etc.

I would not want to try and service it. and Service is my experience.

--
John G

Wot's Your Real Problem?

*shrug* The customer is always right. The reason for wanting it is [supposedly] ease of assembly by people who don't understand what they're doing. I think this will be offset 5x over by difficulty in perceiving colors (for instance I have terrible difficulty deciding if a given resistor stripe is red or orange if both colors don't occur on the same part).

I think I may have persuaded him to use fewer colors by pointing out that the connectors on my board are grouped functionally and laid out with some mechanical foresight, so he can build two identical 30-wire harnesses and a separate 15-wire harness rather than a single massive

75-wire snake.

Google for "wire striping". You will get a list of manufacturers. I would expect one could direct you to a vendor who uses their equipment.

With the way-back machine set for the early seventies, I worked for Wang Labs, who colored all of their own wire for harnesses including multi-stripes and solids. They bought milllions of feet of white wire and ran the machine full time for their own needs. When you needed some wire for an engineering project you could get anything you wanted. If they didn't have it on the shelf, they put you in the queue based on the darkness of the colors you asked for.

Scott

With that way-back machine similarly set, I worked for Grass Valley Group, a manufacturer of switching and effects equipment for the television braodcast and post production industries. A major portion of the company's business then was a line if switchers whose rack mounted portions were constructed using card cages and wiring harnesses rather than back-planes. The harnesses were built up out of discreet wires that assemblers pulled from a rack of spools. I think the spool racks held 70 or 80 spools of color coded wires, striped as described above. I'm fairly certain that the spools were purchased from some vendor rather than being colored at our factory.

I have no idea where one might purchase these today, though. I recently constructed a home-brew project for which I would like to have purchased a set of 10 spools of unstriped black through white and was unable to find a vendor of such. In my research, though, I discovered that wire is suprisingly expensive these days.

--
========================================================================
          Michael Kesti            |  "And like, one and one don't make
                                   |   two, one and one make one."
    mrkesti at comcast dot net     |          - The Who, Bargain

I used some of the early Grass Valley equipment in '73 & '74. A pair of B&W sync generators with the automatic switch over, and another card cage full of Distribution Amplifiers.

One word: Surplus. Mendelson's, Skycraft, and others literally have tons of surplus hookup wire. I can get a lot of colors, but it is on

1000' and larger spools. I have some already, and I will be posting it on my website for sale in small to medium quantities. I also have some rubber test prod wire and teflon coax. I am not in business, I am just trying to thin out my collection of spare parts as I can. has a few of the items listed, and I am open to reasonable offers, or trades. I also have a "projects" section that lists what I am working on, and a small bone yard of damaged or half stripped items I have picked up for parts.

--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida