![]() I’m usually able to find them for about $8 a cassette for aftermarket or $20+ for genuine Brother cassettes.Īlthough it’s a simple thing, the ability to quickly, durably, and legibly label cables is a big plus and one I find quite satisfying. Standard P-Touch label cassettes hold 8 meters of tape the heat-shrink cassettes are all 1.5 meters. Heat-shrink cassettes aren’t super expensive on a per cassette basis but on a per foot basis they’re kind of pricey. I now stock heat-shrink tubes in 5.8, 11.7, 17.7, and 23.6mm widths. Once it’s been heated the label is pretty durable, though it doesn’t have the laminated clear protective layer of the standard P-Touch labels. I’ve noticed that the text printed on the tube can be rubbed off if you handle it much before applying heat. ![]() The only difference is that instead of peeling the backing and sticking the label on you slide the tube onto its destination and heat it. The process of printing a heat-shrink tube is little different than that of a standard label. But, further investigation on Brother’s website says that only a few of their commercial label-makers work with the HSe labels, and those units start at about $150. It turns out Brother has a line of heat-shrink tubing, their HSe cassettes, for just such a purpose. It looked like the best possible solution and I was intrigued. While crawling around the bilges of newer boats I noticed that manufacturers were printing labels on heat-shrink tubing and attaching that to the cables. Heat-shrink labels applied to a wiring harness by the Cobia factory I’ve also tried cable wraps from the wider labels and initially believed this was my answer until I came back a few days later and discovered the label itself had separated from the tight radius of wrapping around the cable. The flags work okay, but they’re a pain to apply, stick out, and easily get caught and ripped, plus if you loom the cables together, they frequently get stuck in the bundle. So then I moved on to using my Brother P-Touch label-maker to print cable flags or cable wraps. That didn’t work for me because invariably I don’t have the decoding spreadsheet when I needed it. I’ve tried the little cloth numbers that go around the wire and then documenting each wire in a spreadsheet. Over the years I’ve used various strategies for creating wiring labels. The one sure fire way to avoid delaminating is to wrap clear heat shrink around the label.A cable flag that I wrinkled when attaching.So, a few months ago I undertook figuring out how to label my wires better. ![]() Experience - and the sheer quantity of wires I run - has demonstrated that’s not a winning strategy. I used to tell myself that I’d remember what a wire was for and hence didn’t worry about labeling it. I run a lot of wires on my boats and often in a hurry. ![]()
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