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BENCO made our name by creating cables for farmers that they couldn’t find anywhere else. We still specialize in creating those hard-to-find wiring harnesses and cables for agricultural sprayers and planters. We have an extensive backlog of engineered cables we can draw on to keep your older planter or sprayer up and running. We still stock many of these cables, so give us a call to see if we have what you need.
BENCO is one of the few companies that will engineer a cable for you when everyone else says “No.” However, BENCO will not make a cable that isn’t engineered to work with your machine. Many times just running a wire from one connector to another will provide the wrong electrical resistance and it will burn up the other components of your machine very quickly.
This means we either need to find OEM manufacturing specs and engineering drawings for the replacement cable, or we need to reverse engineer it ourselves. This R&D can get expensive. However, it may be the only option available.
There are is a lot that goes into designing and building a wiring harness. The more information we have before we start, the faster and easier it is to build your cable. Below are the three paths these custom projects tend to go down and what to expect in each. Be aware we cannot begin to quote the cable until we have the engineering of the final cable that needs to be built.
If you need a replacement harness, see if you can find the OEM wiring diagram and engineering drawing. We will need the pinouts, the length of each section of the harness, and also any other components that go into the cable. This should all be in the engineering drawing. If we have all the instructions we need to build your cable, then it’s fairly straight-forward to quote and build the cable. Your only delay is the wait for an opening in the production schedule. If you can supply the engineering drawing for the cable, your pocket book and your timetable will thank you.
If you don’t have the specs for your cable, we will first attempt to research it ourselves. If we can find it, this is usually far cheaper than reverse engineering the cable itself. We charge $120/hour for this research and can’t guarantee we will find what we need, but we usually know a few places to look. If we can find what we need, we can then just quote out the cable and slot it into the production cue.
This is where things get expensive. This is a time-consuming process and we will definitely need the old harness and may likely need your machine for measuring and testing. We need to research the pinouts, the ohm loads on the wires, figure out the best paths to route the wires and measure the lengths of each section. These projects take a lot of time away from our other production, so we cannot guarantee timelines. This time is also billed hourly at our standard service rate of $120/hour. Once the cable is reverse engineered, we will quote out the cable based on parts & labor and get it into the production cue.
Reverse engineering becomes much more affordable when buying multiple cables at once, such as OEM applications where you may do an initial order of 10 or more of the same harness. Also, simple cables are much more affordable to reverse engineer. The more complex the harness, the more time it takes to engineer its production.
