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If you’ve dived under the hood of any car built in the last 40 years, you’ve likely noticed the bundles of neatly-wrapped cables making up the car’s wiring loom. [The Q] has built a tool for handling jobs like this yourself.
The build starts with a pair of sprockets linked up with bicycle chain, and mounted to a wooden frame. A motor drives the smaller sprocket, which turns the larger sprocket in turn. The larger sprocket itself is mounted on a series of internal rollers, while it mounts a carrier for a roll of tape. As the larger sprocket turns, it will happily wrap whatever you feed through the central hole in tape in a neat and tidy manner.
For those working with automotive looms, large robot cable runs, or PC builds, a tool like this can be of great utility. [The Q} even demonstrates it put to oddball tasks, like wrapping bicycle handlebars or pipe threads. We’ve seen similar builds before, too. Video after the break.
Wow, I love this! Amazing video work too. So much effort to make such a silly yet useful thing.
“useful”….for the pipe and handlebars, it would have been quicker to just apply the tape manually.
Probably a bad example from the video, but I see a use case for this.
Agreed! I also dug the ASMR-quality fabrication noises.
Didn’t you all do this one a few months ago?
They linked a two day old video months ago?
It’s linked at the bottom of the article
The combination of the two seems perfect.
This one as a “base” but add a quick release element to the chain and remove a small section of the large sprocket.
-> still uses plenty of(f?)-the-shelf parts but you can wrap cables without feeding them through(!) the apparatus.
the other wrapper was infinitely better because you could address the possibility of a split loom and start in the middle without any issues at all.
Yeah, and the giant nut to hold the tape on the latest is a huge liability for injuries.
Needs a self powered feed.
My first job was as a taper on an assembly line making Ford wiring harnesses they had one of these machines for short single path stuff. We tapers (dozens) learned quickly that we had to use both hands and whirl that roll around fast and up takeoffs and back to the main run all while slowly walking to the left.
Relevant to this posting the tape had no sticky side but was slightly sticky to itself. Most importantly the roll is held backwards and spun around giving a tight wrap. I wonder if sticky side out tape exists and would work better than the normal roll.
For a personal project, I’d much rather use a laced wiring harness. That’s still how they do things in the aviation industry, too.
He wrapped the Teflon tape backwards…it will wad up when screwing in the pipe.
Pretty clever. But, I tend to just put a single wrap every 6″ or so and then bury my harnesses in flexible convoluted plastic conduit. Then I wrap each end a couple of times and call it done.