Cavity Seal Part

A small seal—often a rubber grommet—fitted around an individual Contact where its wire enters a connector cavity. It provides environmental sealing against moisture and dust on a per-contact basis.

Assigning a Cavity Seal

Cavity seals are added to a Connector Configuration, like contacts and cavity plugs. Click Add accessory in the configuration’s heading and choose Cavity seal, then select or create the seal. A seal goes into a cavity alongside its contact; it doesn’t take the place of one.

Each seal has rules for which cavities it goes into. Click Rules on its row to change them:

• Apply to: Connected cavities, Unconnected cavities or Never. A new seal applies to connected cavities.
• Cavity size: as for contacts, shown when the connector’s pinout has cavities of more than one size.
• Wire diameter: for connected cavities, the outside diameter of the cavity’s wire, including insulation. A new seal ticks Use the cavity seal part’s wire diameter range, so it follows the part’s Wire Diameter; untick it to enter a custom Thinnest and Thickest. A seal holds one wire, so a cavity with more than one wire, or a wire with no diameter, doesn’t match a diameter range.
• Contact: Any contact (including cavities with no contact), or only cavities holding one of the ticked contacts. The configuration’s own contacts are listed first; add any other contact, such as one assigned to cavities by hand, from Add another contact. The rule follows whichever contact the cavity ends up with, whether it comes from the configuration or is assigned by hand.

Each cavity takes the first seal in the configuration whose rules it matches, so a configuration can hold one seal per wire size or per contact. The BOM counts one seal per cavity it goes into.

Seeing and Overriding a Cavity’s Seal

With Show parts on, each cavity row in the Schematic view shows its seal to the right of its contact, whenever the cavity has one or has turned the configuration’s seal off. Seals are drawn in their own colour. Like a contact, a seal that comes from the configuration’s rules has a dashed border around its part bar; one you’ve set on the cavity has a solid one. In the seal picker, the seal the configuration would fit is marked Default. A wiring table shows the seal in the Contact column, after the contact, also in the parts’ own colours.

To give one cavity a different seal, left-click its seal, either in the cavity row or in the wiring table, or right-click the cavity and select its seal (or Assign Seal), and choose another, search the parts catalog, or create one. To give a cavity no seal, choose Don’t use default part. To go back to the configuration’s seal, left-click the seal in the wiring table and choose Unassign part, or, if you turned the seal off, left-click it in the cavity row or the wiring table and choose Use default part.

To add a seal to a cavity that the rules don’t give one, right-click the cavity and select Assign Seal. The wiring table also shows an empty seal slot in any wired cavity of a connector whose configuration has seals. A cavity holding a cavity plug takes no seal, so its menu has no seal row.