Wiring Loom Colours

[Smiler.]

Is there a standard key for wiring loom colours or are they all different?

e.g. G/Y = Green/Yellow or Grey/Yellow?

Ta.

[AlpineAndy]

In french cars it varies.
They could all be yellow, or grey or blue

[100SRV]

It depends whether the car was built to conform to BS Au 7a which most British cars were, European ones are a different matter. In general for UK designed vehicles the first letter is the base colour and subsequent letters are the tracer colours. The following list applies:

B - Black
N - browN
R - Red
O - Orange
Y - Yellow
G - Green
U - blUe
S - Slate
W - White
L = Ligth (e.g. LG = Light Green)
P = Purple (although where I work it they use "L" for "Lilac" - must have been a felt-tip fairy who designed the scheme...
K - pinK

Beware! Many DIN (German built) vehicles use Black as battery live and Brown for return (0 Volts).

Hope that helps!

100SRV

[Smiler.]

Cheers Matt

[Pigeon]

100SRV said:

Beware! Many DIN (German built) vehicles use Black as battery live and Brown for return (0 Volts).

...which is probably responsible for the destruction of more car stereos than anything else.

I suppose they have to move on to blowing up car stereos now they can't blow up people by having red for earth in mains wiring...

[dilbert]

100SRV said:

It depends whether the car was built to conform to BS Au 7a which most British cars were, European ones are a different matter. In general for UK designed vehicles the first letter is the base colour and subsequent letters are the tracer colours. The following list applies:

B - Black
N - browN
R - Red
O - Orange
Y - Yellow
G - Green
U - blUe
S - Slate
W - White
L = Ligth (e.g. LG = Light Green)
P = Purple (although where I work it they use "L" for "Lilac" - must have been a felt-tip fairy who designed the scheme...
K - pinK

Beware! Many DIN (German built) vehicles use Black as battery live and Brown for return (0 Volts).

Hope that helps!

100SRV

Used to work in defence, and the appraoch there was to use only one colour, pink for equipment wire, and white for wirewrap. The pink ones always had matching colour/number rings at each end, sometimes up to five digits. Each connector/termination had a schedule against it which mapped a specific pin to a specific wire number, and a descriptive name.

The wirewrap stuff... No numbering there, but you would always have a schedule showing which pins on the backplane were supposed to be connected together. Not actually as bad as it sounds because the key tool was a continuity tester. At least you were always able to get at both ends of the connection at the same time.

[Pigeon]

dilbert said:

Used to work in defence, and the appraoch there was to use only one colour, pink for equipment wire, and white for wirewrap. The pink ones always had matching colour/number rings at each end, sometimes up to five digits. Each connector/termination had a schedule against it which mapped a specific pin to a specific wire number, and a descriptive name.

I built the wiring loom for my bike on that system, mainly to avoid having to buy reels of 2.5mm tri-rated in loads of different colours. It's great when you only need to get at the connections, but on a living vehicle that is rarely exclusively true...

[dilbert]

Pigeon said:

dilbert said:

Used to work in defence, and the appraoch there was to use only one colour, pink for equipment wire, and white for wirewrap. The pink ones always had matching colour/number rings at each end, sometimes up to five digits. Each connector/termination had a schedule against it which mapped a specific pin to a specific wire number, and a descriptive name.

I built the wiring loom for my bike on that system, mainly to avoid having to buy reels of 2.5mm tri-rated in loads of different colours. It's great when you only need to get at the connections, but on a living vehicle that is rarely exclusively true...

I think with defence the difficulty stems from the fact that they use PTFE coated wire, which is only available in limited colours. The problem is worsened, by the sheer number of wires that you usually have. If there is a descrete identity for each individual wire in the whole system (not a bad idea) you just cant encode an intelligable color scheme on to the wire anyhow.

All I know is that producing and checking wiring schedules was hell manually, but didn't half benefit from an ad-hoc excel macro!

[100SRV]

Hi,
I've been involved with electrical design from machinery control cabinets (Metal Box Engineering) and ended up managing chassis electrical design. The control cabinets used single colour wires to denote systems (e.g. yellow for interlocks to other machines, blue for DC) with critchley marker sleeves to code the wires alphanumerically.

I'd like to use the single colour with numbers approach but the chassis' I've been responsible for are low-volume (initially 10 CFR chassis P.A. and now, with my new employer, 22 specialist commercial per week) and have lots of options, either ex-works or after market.

The colours we use are less than ideal because most don't conform to the BS system but the electrical fitters "know" what wire is what so I have to be careful about making a campaign change...until I've completed the chassis-cab electrical schematic! I've been using VeSys for the automotive design work for quite a few years now and it is a fantastic UK designed application.

Pigeon - great site and I love the rants...

100SRV