Epec's Blog | Electronics Manufacturing Solutions

Manufacturers requiring localized heating for their applications turn to the advantages of flexible heaters that are mounted to components and equipment. These heaters can provide low level or high-level heat at varying temperatures to offer the appropriate thermal transfer based on the applications.

Whether used in the aerospace industry to de-ice equipment, or the food industry to bring ingredients up to a suitable temperature, flexible heaters provide the right amount of generated heat based on the application. These types of heaters can be attached to smooth, bulky and curved equipment in different sizes and functions.

In my last blog post, Five Why Root Cause Analysis Starts with a Good Problem Statement, I recommended that problem-solving teams develop well-crafted problem statements. This blog post will discuss the best practices for the five why method of root cause analysis.

Discrete wire, or lead wire, is the backbone of any interconnect or cable. Within this blog post we break down for you the anatomy of the basic hookup wire and the compositions that can be used as a single unit or grouped together to produce a multi-conductor or multi-pair cable.

Heat shrink tubing, also known as heat shrink, is a shrinkable tube that shrinks radially when exposed to heat. Produced using a two-step process, heat shrink is available in a wide range of materials to suit almost any application. Heat shrink tubing has many useful applications, including to provide electrical insulation to wires, connections, joints, terminals, and splices, as well as bundling loose items such as wires and as a protective covering.

Here at Epec Engineered Technologies, we believe that our customers come first. Everything we are is because of our customers. We also strive to make sure that our employees are happy. We are part of a family and we want to make sure we work as a cohesive team; in fact, throughout our facility you will often hear the phrase “One Team, One Fight”.

There are many areas to consider when designing and building cost-effective custom cable assemblies. The areas of primarily importance to be reviewed are the raw material selection, ensuring your assembly is designed for ease of manufacturability, choosing the correct connector, and correctly specifying the criteria the assembly should meet or exceed. If all of these areas are optimized correctly in the design stage, you stand the best chance of keeping your manufacturing costs as low as possible.

Root cause analysis is a technique performed to identify the underlying reasons why a particular problem is occurring. At Epec, we do a lot of problem solving. As manufacturers, we strive to discover better, more efficient ways to delight our customers. Whether we are working on an 8D CAPA or running an A3 Project, we are often working to determine the foundational cause of issues as the means to solving the problem.

As custom manufactured cable assemblies have grown in complexity, it has become far more common to see various electronics integrated directly into the finished design. The inclusion of electronics into a cable assembly design can consist of adding a switch, PCB, LED, or a multitude of other components. Once added, these components offer a much higher level of sophistication to the cable assembly while allowing the included electronics the ability to withstand a much more rugged working environment.

EMI (electromagnetic interference) and RFI (radio-frequency interference) are disturbances generated by external sources that impact a cable assembly by degrading the assembly's performance or completely preventing it from functioning. These disturbances can cause problems ranging from an increase in error rates of the signal being transmitted through the assembly to total loss of any electronically readable signal.