3

Wire Labeling made Easy

 

I have a buddy that owns a fancy wire labeler.  It has a keyboard where you type in your text and it prints out nice pieces of colored heat shrink tubing emblazoned with text.  Cool, but expensive.  Another buddy is building a show quality Glasair, Gary Shipp, and makes his own wire labels in a much more economical way and gets just as professional results.  He simply prints out his label on a standard home computer inkjet printer, trims it to size, and inserts it inside a piece of clear heat shrink tubing.  He places it over the wire in and finally shrinks the tubing with a heat gun. 

Note: The following information has been presented elsewhere; but if you are like me, you probably forgot. Thanks to Greg Fisher, it is available again. If you don’t use this tip, you are going to regret it the first time you need to redo wire work.

Let us look at the steps and material required:

The clear heatshrink tubing is available at Marvac (www.marvac.com) in Newport Beach.  I use 3/32” tubing for 18 ga and 20 ga wire (and smaller if you use it)  and 1/8” tubing for wire sizes 16 ga and larger, up to about 12 ga.  The labels are printed out on my Epson inkjet printer.  I use Word with a font size of 8.  You can certainly experiment on your own.  Add color background or use bold text!

Here is the result.  If you roll the heatshrink in your fingers after it is warm, then heat it up one last time, the label conforms nicely to the wire and looks great.