Pro 1....oh brother !

Doncha just love that? You go into some of these old panels and you don't dare touch the wires for fear that the masking tape lables will disintegrate to mear flakes and you'll have to buzz out the entire job.

The soulution? You take each wire, one by one, VERY very carefully ....... read the lable ( if you can) write the description on a NEW piece of masking tape and there ya go. Good for another few years or so.

GAWD! ...... You'd think they'd come back more often to change the tape .....Right? ..... SIGH!

Me? I don't have none of that. .... Ya gotta use something that lasts a long long time. It takes up alot of space and it's hard to get off the roll, but ....... I use duct tape.

Not a very elegant solution

I run into a lot of systems that I think were done by by the same guy, he always used that first aid tape, it actually held up pretty well

All kidding aside, I never liked using labels. We always wrote on the wire jacket using a fine tip Sharpie laundry marker. The mark will stay on there until Jesus come back (at which point Leuck can take over my business and Doug can have the house)... :^)

That's how we do it. It does a little practice and, being left handed, I had to learn to write the label starting with the last letter and working my way back to avoid smearing.

In cold weather, (I'm in Michigan) you gotta give it extra time to dry before you start messing with it.

Granted, sometimes they can be hard to read but we've pretty much discontinued the use of contractions at least on prewires so if the label does get partially smeared, the next guy has more letters with which to work out what the label was.

That's what I do. But on takeovers I would just put lines on the zones they were connected to. Sorta like Roman numerals, but after 3 they got 4,5,6, lines.

Funny. Being left-handed, that's how I did it, too.

Michigan isn't clod. It's f-f-f-friggin' f-f-freezing!

I can write pretty neatly even on the jacket of 22/4 so that wasn't a problem. When pulling wire for a switch I'd write on the cable about 2' from the start, wait a few seconds and shove run it through. We always hung the empty cabinet during the prewire. After all the cables were done, I'd pull all the wires into the cabinet, trim them to the proper length and re-write the labels a few inches from where the jacket would later be stripped. This made wiring up the board neat and easy later when finishing the job.

BTW, you know how most guys leave a service loop of extra cable in the wall behind any device? We did that and also left a loop in the entire bundle in the joists above the panel. It saved a lot of splicing if I ever needed to make adjustments but the wiring inside the panel stayed neat with squared turns, etc.

Roman numerals? Heh, heh, heh... I don't recall if I posted this here or not but remember a certain individual I used to refer to as the MM? He once threatened to come up to my church in CT. What he didn't know was my pastor used to read the newsgroup. As you might imagine, he had a rather negative view of some folks here, including that guy.

Well, each year when we did our Passion Play the artist who designed the stage would write the current year in Roman numerals above Pilate's palace. In 2000 the pastor and I were going over the lighting design when he looked up at the stage and said, "Look. Your friend, Mike is being honored". We had a good laugh. :^)

I do the same except when the wire is a dark color I wrap white electrical tape around the wire and write on that. Some people just can't write on the wire legibly though. I've pretty much standarized on abbreviations and jacket colors when I can, so I can usually tell what the wire is even if it gets a little distroyed.

Figures .... you'd be the one to not "get it".

Oh I get it, it ends up looking like shit but hey it's your installation

Come on Mark. Your not really that obtuse, are you?

It was a joke. I really don't use duct tape ....... it was just a subtle bit of humor.

You know .... like ..... somebody is criticized for using masking tape and then someone else says they use something much better than masking tape ..... Duct Tape! Get it? Har de har har! You could have said that you tried that once but the feathers made you sneeze.

Come on now ..... you can do it. It's called humor. Maybe not GOOD humor but a little levitation to keep things "up" ..... never hurt. Ya Know?

Ummmm ..... never mind.

I like how you do the ..... thing, really brings out the emotions

How high? :^)

Just high enough to go over his head.

Ummm, not very high.