TRS Event TRS 25th Anniversary Fall Adventure - Land Between The Lakes - September 5th – 8th, 2024

[sgtsandman]

OMG!!

Why all white?

The next time I see someone that wired everything inside their truck with red wire, I'm going to tell them to join the Air Force.

No idea. All I know is that when wires get rerun, they have to run the wires through a special printer that prints the number it needs to have before it's run. The only exception I can think of is the wires for the fuel pumps, some of those have red and black wires.

 

[Snoranger]

Mack uses white with an orange tracer stripe and sprinted circuit number for all the power wires and grey for all ground wires.

 

[Curious Hound]

In industrial settings, you don't normally see as many wire colors. You label both ends of each wire and there is a set scheme for deriving the wire numbers. For example;
Brown, orange and yellow are the 3 phases for a 480v/277v wiring sytem.
Black, red and blue are the 3 phases for 240/120v system.
White or gray for the neutrals
Green or green with yellow trace for grounds
Red for 120v control wiring
Yellow for 120v power from a separate source outside the panel (this warns you that it is still energized when the panel main disconnect is off)
Blue for 24volt control wiring
White or blue/white fir 24v neutral
European 24v system may use brown for 24v and blue for neutral
A multiconductor control cable will often use all the same color, usually blue or black, for everything except ground. The wires have numbers printed on them starting with 1 and working up. But when they break out if the cable and terminate, they receive a label designating what they are in the wiring diagrams.
Communications cables with twisted pairs will have their own color standards.

When numbering wires, the standard we use, which is very common, comes from the wiring g diagram book. Each page has one or 2 columns with numbers down the left side. So, on page 100, the numbers going down the left side start at 100 and increase numerically. So, a wire that originates on page 100 in row 1004 will be wire number 10041 at both ends. If that wire terminates at a pushbutton, which will be labeled PB1004, then the wire leaving the other side if PB1004 in the row will be wire number 10042 at both ends. It all makes sense and is easy to follow, once you learn this simple system. If wire 10042 continues to page 206, there will be a notation stating this. Go to page 206 and you will see wire 10042 terminating at some device, like a contactor coil in row 2067. Then the neutral on the other side of the coil will probably be wire 10002, which originated at the 24volt power supply in row 0 on page 100.

Simple. huh?

 

[Rick W]

Yeah, my first Ranger, when I bought the cap and had it put on, the shop tapped the brake wire in the taillight and put some filter thing on that they claimed was needed so the third brake light on the cap didn’t come on with marker lights or blink with turn signals. Now I’m thinking they might just not have had any idea what they were doing. Of course, I haven’t checked that truck, but it’s probably the same as my green Ranger since they both are 2000 XLT extended cabs and apparently both had factory tow packages since I know my blue one was tow packaged and HD suspension/brakes even though it was a power-nothing 2wd with a manual transmission. I think it would be possible with some wire from a junk truck to just tap right into the factory plug for the 3rd brake light feed.

And yeah, you would probably have to get a subscription to like AllData or something and look every vehicle up individually. There’s no real consistency for vehicle wiring. I even found that the factory manual isn’t always right. The factory electrical manual for a 2000 Ranger shows the ground for the trailer wiring as a black wire. There is no black wire. At all. But there’s a white ground wire and it’s a bit of factory wire. Go figure.

Amen. I don’t know Rangers like you guys do, but I have every manual, service manual and shop manual you can get for my square body Lincolns. A general guide at best, and they don’t even match each other.

 

[Rick W]

Mack uses white with an orange tracer stripe and sprinted circuit number for all the power wires and grey for all ground wires.

All my English and German cars had brown grounds. Don’t remember the Italian, but I want to say brown too.

Someone mentioned black with a white dashed line. When I did the trouble shooting on my 2001 Ford OEM AM/Fm/cassette/CD to get the backlight working in my ‘97, I discovered there was a black ground for the entire unit, and a separate black ground with the white dashed line for the background lights. That would lead me to believe that Black wood always be a ground, and the dash line color would be the color of the feed to something with an independent ground, like an orange line with a black line with orange stripe ground.

But I don’t know what I’m talking about

 

[JoshT]

OMG!!

Why all white?

Quantity... There are too many wires on an aircraft to rty to mark them by color coding alone. All wires are marked as @sgtsandman said, either printed directly on the wire or on heat shrink labels attached to the wire aat regular intervals along the wire, I seem to recall it being every 6 inches.

When you have that much wire to purchase and run, buying a single color is cheaper than buying many colors. Now you can probably print the identifiers in a multitude of colors, but when they started doing that it was probably only black. White is traditionally the easiest wire color to print legible identifiers on, with black lettering on a white background being the most practical and easiest to read.

I'm sure that there are more official answers, but between schooling and experience over time, that has been my explination of choice.

When I say there are too many wires on an aircraft I should give an example. We stored a lit of stuff in what we called impact boxes (an example pictured below) which were flat pack boxes with the foot print of a standard pallet. It would be a stretch to say that all of the wiring in your car or truck would fill half of one of these. When were rewiring the F-15s, a relatively small aircraft, we would fill several of these on each aircraft packed tight with nothing but removed wire.

 

[Curious Hound]

Next week

 

[85_Ranger4x4]

On the road again...

 

[Curious Hound]

On the road again...

Aaaah. The 1885 ford Ranger. Complete with single kerosene headlight and brass bell.

 

[sgtsandman]

Aaaah. The 1885 ford Ranger. Complete with single kerosene headlight and brass bell.

By that time, they had dynamos to generate electricity for lights. They use the steam to turn the dynamos for electricy generation. The only reason I know that is because I follow a youtube channel that does nothing but geek out on trains.

 

[85_Ranger4x4]

By that time, they had dynamos to generate electricity for lights. They use the steam to turn the dynamos for electricy generation. The only reason I know that is because I follow a youtube channel that does nothing but geek out on trains.

Actually that one is towing a modern locomotive to run the power for the cars.

 

[NakedDucks]

It makes me sad I will miss it this year.

Maybe next year…..

 

[Curious Hound]

It makes me sad I will miss it this year.

Maybe next year…..

You live closer than me.

 

[NakedDucks]

Work schedule.

No personal life if you work for the railroad

 

[Curious Hound]

Work schedule.

No personal life if you work for the railroad

I understand that. Work is a necessary evil for most of us.