Many harness assemblies have individual wire ID's either printed on the insulation or applied as a label. In typical production, terminated wires are inserted (first end) into a connector by matching the wire ID to the cavity location. If errors are made on the first end and assemblers rely on the wire ID's for pinning the second end, mis-wires can occur. If the second end is terminated discretely later in the field, or spliced to other labeled wires, and any of the wire ID's are incorrect, the second end assembler will make mistakes since he/she is relying on the labels to be correct.

Harnesses installed in aircraft and other complex equipment with wrong ID's create nightmares for service techs doing maintenance or troubleshooting. When they recognize a wrong wire ID for a particular pin position, should they put it into the correct position? Should they leave it alone?

View a demo of the process at:

    First Side Pinning

After assuring correct ID's at the first end you can safely speed up assembly at the second end with our popular guided assembly capability as described in the next section.

The easy-wire CR with connector graphics and pin detection make first-end pinning easy!

One of the most time-consuming steps in building cable assemblies is deciding which wire goes into which pin position of a connector. If you build cables that start with the connector at one end fully loaded, you then need to selectively load the connector at the other end. To simplify this effort you may label each wire or use color-coded wires, both of which usually add expense. Using identical colored wires eliminates these wire-coding costs, only to replace them with longer assembly times. The simple solution to eliminating wire-coding costs while keeping assembly time short can come from a cable tester that gives "guided assembly" instructions during the assembly process.

See us next at these shows:

• Assembly Technology Expo, Chicago September 25-27
• Nepcon East, Boston, October 30-31