By choosing us as their outsourcing partner, Electro-Prep, Inc. helped a marine industry manufacturer overcome issues with product assembly and improve the production timeline for unmanned underwater search vehicles. Before our involvement, they experienced problems with the wiring because elements were built separately. We developed a solution for combining and binding the wires into a single harness that streamlined the vehicle’s wiring process, while still providing full compliance with industry standards for performance and safety in an undersea environment.
Addressing issues including manufacturability and materials specifications, we designed and fabricated the subsea qualified wire harness from the ground up using forming boards. Intended to ensure the highest degree of repeatability and reproducibility in the final product, the forming boards list all of the wire runs and give our certified technicians a full-scale layout of the wire paths, bends, and terminations.
Although wire harness assembly can be labor-intensive, we employed both semi-automatic and hand crimping tools to expedite the process. We also engineered and built custom fixtures to perform 100% continuity testing on each assembly.
This harness combined discrete wires and multi-conductor cable with circular and rectangular connectors, splicing, and soldered terminations. For the early production runs, we bundled the wires using a plastic spiral wrap. But that was switched to military wire lacing, which ended up being far easier for the company’s assemblers to work with when installing the harness into a very tight location. We continue to supply a variety of these wire harnesses in medium to high volumes. They have saved our customer significant assembly time, and with their rugged construction, provide long-term performance reliability in critical submersible search vehicles.
To learn more about our wire harness assembly capabilities or any of our other contract manufacturing services, contact us directly.
