Creating Your Own Custom Design Cables

Creating Custom Design Cables

Manufacturing custom design cable on a small-scale.

Working with a cable manufacturer to produce custom design cables for prototypes.

When working on a small-scale project or making a prototype, it’s tempting to try your hand at electrical engineering. After all, you have likely contacted a few wiring and cabling manufacturers and found that they only produce large quantities of wiring. This adds an additional layer of difficulty for those Creating Custom Design Cables on a small-scale; however, finding a manufacturer that produces small quantities of custom design cables can prove to be beneficial. The expertise that a custom manufacturer has to offer can eliminate the additional time, and costs, that often arise when choosing to produce your own custom wiring. Some of the unexpected costs and stressors associated with choosing to craft wire harnesses and cable assemblies without consulting a manufacturer include:

Finding Specialized Tools When Creating Custom Design Cables:

While wiring and cabling often seems straightforward, the process usually requires more tooling than expected. Manufacturer assemblies go through various rounds of testing and quality assurance to ensure that the practices and processes utilized will yield a quality product. Cable manufacturing companies utilize a variety of testing materials beyond multimeters to test their products including clamp testing, life cycle testing, capacitor testing, and more.

Aside from this, specialized training and custom tooling are required to create highly customized wiring systems. One example of this can be seen when working with a wire’s connectors. Some of these connectors need to be soldered to the wire, while others require the use of crimp connectors. Crimping tools can be used for this, but the less expensive hand-held ones are known to be fallible – particularly when the user is inexperienced. Incorrectly crimping a connector can lead to loose connections that create air pockets, deformed connectors that are more likely to break or come apart, and a plethora of other issues.

Finding the Appropriate Materials When Creating Custom Design Cables:

Assembly cabling typically requires a level of specialization that is difficult to find when choosing from off-the-shelf options. The jacketing and filler materials used in the custom wire harnesses and cable assemblies created by trained manufacturers can be made to exacting specifications. These specifications can include resistance to certain types of chemicals and oils, adding protection against UV rays, ensuring that the product is heat rated, and a variety of other useful features.

Understanding the Exact Specifications of Your Wiring:

Calculating the wire gauge that your product requires to function optimally is a difficult process that requires an understanding of industry best practices and standards. These vary based on the type of product that you will be producing, the product’s intended industry, the area that the product will be sold in and more. By working with a manufacturer and their team of engineers, you can ensure that your product meets required safety standards early on in the manufacturing process so that major changes will not have to be made down the line.

Working With Wiring Diagrams on Your Creating Custom Design Cables:

Producing a wiring diagram and planning out the way that the wires and cables will run in your product is an important aspect of the design process. This maps out how long the wires or cables will need to be, where the wires and cables will run to avoid interference, and is an important tool for communicating with other manufacturers about the product’s design and layout. Unfortunately though, many often skip this step when crafting their own wiring or cabling systems. This is detrimental as it becomes increasingly difficult to communicate the layout of the wiring, label the products in use, and ensure that the wires do not interfere with one another. An experienced manufacturer will be able to produce an accurate wiring diagram for your product to eliminate this confusion.

At Meridian Cable, our team specializes in creating small batches of customized products. With our experience creating products on a small-scale, we are able to work with our customers to design wiring and cabling that compliments their products and helps them to run as efficiently as possible. If you need a custom cable, cable assembly, or wire harness – don’t hesitate to contact the Meridian Team.