Laying out wire harnesses from a schematic
A nailboard is a wire-harness layout that sits alongside a schematic. Where the schematic shows the electrical design, the nailboard shows how the wires are physically bundled and routed — the reference the build floor uses to lay out and assemble a harness correctly.
A nailboard's connector list is pulled from its parent schematic — connectors on the nailboard correspond to the symbols (with reference designators) placed on the schematic. Nodes and bundles are then laid out and drawn manually to represent how the harness branches and groups.
Nailboards are opened from the Nailboard menu in the schematic's top toolbar, which lists any nailboards already created for that schematic and lets you open one or create a new one. They can also be opened from the Search tab, either by expanding a schematic's row to reveal its nailboards or by filtering the Type column to Nailboards.
Like schematics, an existing nailboard always opens in read-only view mode first — click Edit to unlock the layout tools and make changes. A brand-new nailboard (just created, or just copied from another revision) opens directly in edit mode instead, since there's nothing on it yet to protect.
The nailboard layout is built from three object types:
Double-click a bundle to set its length. Nailboard layouts in Conductr are not drawn to physical scale — connector and node positions are arranged for clarity, not measured distance — so bundle length is entered directly rather than computed from how far apart two points are drawn on screen.
The Wire Cut List is generated from the nailboard: for each wire in the schematic's netlist, it finds the path across bundles connecting that wire's two endpoint connectors and sums the entered bundle lengths along that path to get the wire's cut length.
The Tables menu also provides a Cable Table (built from cable-type buses in the schematic) along with additional reference tables — Terminal BOM, Connector, Splice, Covering, and Pin tables — for other harness build-sheet needs.
A nailboard has its own Document Properties, separate from its parent schematic's — drawing number, revision, and status (Draft, Released, Obsolete), plus the fields used to fill in a title block. Like schematics, a nailboard can be set to retrieve its title/info from SavantPLM by part number, and a title block from the Title Block Library can be placed on it.
If the parent schematic changes after the nailboard was created — a connector is added or removed — click Refresh Netlist to pull in the current connector list from the schematic. Newly added connectors show up as unplaced until you add them to the layout; removed connectors are reconciled off the board.
When you save a schematic as a new revision, you're asked what should happen to its nailboard:
If a schematic revision was created without copying a nailboard, you can still bring one over later: open the Nailboard menu on that schematic, and if an earlier revision has a nailboard, you'll see an option to copy it from there.
A nailboard that's shared between schematic revisions can drift out of sync if one of those revisions later changes its connector list. If you open a shared nailboard and its parent schematic has changed since it was last synced, Conductr will prompt you to increment (fork a new, independent copy) before continuing, rather than silently editing data that no longer matches that schematic.
Nailboards don't have their own separate access setting — access follows the parent schematic's Access & Collaborators configuration.
If you have questions or need assistance, please visit our Contact page to get in touch with our support team.
For more detailed documentation on specific topics, see the Conductr Help index.