[GreenKeys] Looking for multi-colored wire

[Keith Mc]

Brooke Clarke <brooke@[...]> wrote: 
> Hi Keith:
> How about a photo or sketch of the wire painting jig?

I don't have any pics of it offhand.
(You may be able to Google for something like a "wire stripe painting machine"...)

I used to work for Arrow Electronics, an electronics distributor.
We sold wire as well as components.

One of our affiliated Rep firms had a little strip mall office.  It had 
the jig in his back room.  I saw it ONCE, in the late 1970s...  
At the time, I thought it was the coolest thing, and made a mental
note of the process.  (They had this little side biz going, of painting 
custom stripe patterns on wire reels, for our biggest customers. 
Want a 1000' roll of white and blue stripes on orange wire?  No sweat! :-)

It used changeable bottles of paint, feeding the stripe makers.
A wire source reel was placed on one end, and the takeup reel beyond
the other end, as a separate assembly.  

The wire was simply slowly pulled through it, by a slow motor driven 
spring loaded friction wheel, located immediately before the painting
station, to prevent it from having to touch the wet paint.
This converted any length solid color wire reel into a reel of that 
base color. with one or more color stripes.

I can't remember exactly how stripe rollers (or wire) rotated, but I 
do remember it could create two or three different color spiral stripes 
on the base color, in one pass.   (... which made sense.  The stripes 
wouldn't be mutually spaced correctly if you tried to run the wire 
through the machine more than once...)

The guy running it had an on/off switch, and a speed control knob
on the stripe-maker.  

The take-up reel was on an independent device, similar to how 
paper tape is recollected from a tape reader.  The wire's tension
controlled the take-up motor.  

The wire was thus suspended in mid-air between the two devices, 
giving you space to play with the hair dryer before it was re-rolled.
He then held an industrial hand hair dryer with a curved back reflector 
around the wire as it came off the machine (between the jig and the 
take-up reel), and waved it up and down the wire.  This quickly dried 
the paint in the few seconds before it was rolled back up, without
damaging the core pvc wire insulation..

It was a practiced, semi-skilled operation.  Too much heat in one spot
and you risk damaging the insulation.  To little heat/time, and the paint 
didn't dry enough (and smeared when re-wound on the take-up reel).   
That's why he typically did the entire thing pretty slowly, so he didn't 
need to use a lot of heat.

- Keith Mc.