Topic: Factory Wire Harness Wrap Process

[Bossbill]

While wrapping one of my harnesses, it got me wondering how the factory or vendor got the wrap so consistent.
Here is how:

[scottwo]

Great video
Looks perfectly safe for the operator, if his hand is pulled in...does it get wrapped

[J_Speegle]

Thats got to hurt if you slip 

Must have taken time to do it by hand originally. Maybe the longer looms were done by sub contractors with mechanical contraptions

[Bossbill]

Jeff -- I'm not sure what you mean by "Must have taken time to do it by hand originally."

My contention is that this is the machine could have been used at time if you were a supplier of the larger and longer harnesses.
The machine was in general use from the 50s through the 70s.
I can see where the short harnesses (and your gas station story is certainly telling there) would be done by hand.
And the shorter portions of say, the main front harness on my 67, would be done by hand.
But if one were cranking thousands of these, the long sections from the firewall forward looks too perfect to be done by an unaided human. And would take too much time.

Just another thought . . .

[DKutz]

thats pretty cool.  What company is it?

[carlite65]

i believe the company name is at the start of the video.

[Bob Gaines]

FYI the machine is much much faster but not necessarily much better then what you can do by hand given the correct tape etc.

[Bossbill]

Bob -- I was thinking of this from a production point of view. You guys have drilled into me to look at everything on the concours front from "how did the factory do it?" That applies to vendors too.
If the factory is churning out a car a minute in just 12 hours that's 720 cars -- for one plant.
That's a lot of harnesses and doing them by hand doesn't seem plausible even with multiple vendors.

I've gone through a lot of wrap to get a consistent pattern and have it look original.

I'd like to thank the PO who decided to spray bomb certain colors onto the harness. You just can't get it out of the crevices without really getting aggressive on the thinner -- which tends to soften the wrap.

And one more shout out to Midlife for getting me the Ford connectors I needed. I'll rant about the idiocy of SA using Scotchloks and where they put them in another thread.

[J_Speegle]

I can at least state that the sub we found and visited in the late 60's was doing the looms they were assembling by hand.  They were fairly short (maybe 6 foot in length)  and I have no way of knowing if there were another 50 or another 400 little places doing the same loom as they were .

[midlife]

All righty now!  Who wants to buy me the wrapping machine and a good supply of non-adhesive tape to support all you guys?

I didn't think so...dang.

[Mike_B_SVT]

Ok, that's pretty cool!