jon928se

Guys thanks for the replies - even negative constructive responses are good. I'll keep investigating although bearing in mind that the point of the exercise is self education as well as getting a useful "product" at the end of it.

PS I can't recall the last time I was offended/upset/hurt by anything anyone ever wrote to me on a forum or in an email. I'm either terminally insensitive, lack imagination or just have skin borrowed from an elephant.

Bill Ball

That's a good way to look at things. I try to do the same, although I occasionally lose my patience with some threads.

cambria

I have Jim Moorehouse's 928 files in my computer, so what I did was opened up the the sheet that I was interested in and saved it as a JPEG. Then went into Autocad opened up a new dwg and inserted the JPEG into the drawing. Be sure to scale the dwg to 11 x 8.5. Next I assigned wire colors as layers and drew over the JPEG.

dr bob

How did you manage the compound colors? That's the real issue. Getting solid colors is a snap, just pick from a color pallet. It's the "red with green spiral tracer" stuff that will need some work.

I did the same thing you describe when I was sorting some AC wiring issues years ago. It was an hour's exercise, and time that could have been as easily spent with a copy and a highlighter. Plotted in a D size, it was a lot easier to read when taped to the wall though.

Landseer

I like the idea of making the diagrams more useable. I like the 1983 format pretty well, not sure if its the best format though.

I've been using the wiring diagrams in preparing an Excel sheet for the 83/84 US A-Z plugs that shows the destination of each wire. Not completed yet, but even incomplete its saving me time and hassle as a quick reference guide. Am adding color notes as well.

jon928se

That is my starting point when i do get a free moment although I will actually start by scanning my own wsm diagrams in the big scanner at work so I don't have to piece together the Jim M ones. When I started this thread I had some free time now I don't and then my X pipe arrived today so I think that will get priority over most everything else - probably even food and beer.

I'm still thinking about that one although I havent yet got as far as listing out all the colour combos. Im thinking that you either get solid colour wires or wires with a single stripe but nothing more complex (a la brown with a yellow barley twist with intermittent candy pink flashes - LOL) in which case it is relatively simple to define a convention for the xxx with yyy stripe being represented as a long xxx dash, short yyy dash with no gaps.

But like I said above it'll have to wait - the pursuit of bwaah comes first obviously after the Honey do's. (Don't actually have honey do's in OZ it's more like "will ya mow the bloody yard now")

The_Remora

I think its a great idea to put this in Autocad. That sounds like a good start, getting the diagram into jpeg format and then inserting as an image file and scaling. I would use that same approach. I do that all the time to get roads, buildings and site contours on my site plans. As far as representing the wires graphically, I'd make a different layer for each type of wire and then use the layer manager to group specific systems together so that you could quickly turn off all but the relevant wires for any particular job. The wires themselves could either be new line types, polylines with thicknesses, splines, composites of hatched polygons, or a combination of these types depending on the wire pattern. There are probably some other options you could use too. Sounds like a good and worthwhile project.