Hickeys

I have been in several Central Offices, but I never worked for any telephone company.

All of my test cables were custom made, with Belden wire, and Switchcraft connectors. They were made to last decades, not weeks. :)

I've got some of the flag ties, but I don't like them. They get caught on tools and equipment on the workbenches.

I see. The expensive, time-consuming, and proper way.

You must be a very patient guy, Mikey.

Easier than resistor color codes? ;)

Consider selling it as ANTIQUE. You'll be rich!

I've used some of those and they're truly a PITA.

My way, or no way!

That wasn't my job, but I was working at the site. We had to provide a connection to the Weathervision system, to the FAA building.

Ten colors, in two groups of five. That gives 25 pairs. The stripes are not the same width, so it is quite easy to pick up.

How about some, new in the box 400E KTU line cards? Or a few subcycle power supplies? :)

Yeah, prolly so.

Hey, some guy is selling old drive-in theater speaker poles with speakers for $250 on Craigslist. Who knows what will sell? List it and see.

Try to find a phone museum and sell it. You'll likely get a good price.

Stripes, or on some telephone cables, solid color with other color dots every half inch or so.

An example, from the start of the sequence is blue and white, typically blue with a white stripe and white with a blue stripe as the other half of the pair. Keep using blue through the other four pair of that group, then increment blue to the next color and repeat the sequence of the other color in the pairs. So each color pair identifies both wires of the pair as belonging together.

Once you get beyond 25 pair, you wrap a 25-pair group in a pair of colored threads and go on to the next bundle which repeats the wire colors already used. So you can have 25 groups of 25 pair -- 625 pair or 1250 wires. Beyond that, I presume that you get bundles of 26 bundles repeating again. But the water-proofing grease used on the

Ah -- SubCycle -- put in 60 Hz, get out 20 Hz by some magic inductive circuit. Used for ringing the phone bells. (Except the other frequency bells used on some party-line systems, in addition to ringing between one wire of the pair and earth ground. :-)

I've got enough of all of the above, but there are certainly some people out there collecting them -- or using them. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

I used to repair the frayed looms on US and Euro cars after accidents, where a replacement wire loom was deemed too expensive. I remember seeing some solid color cables with dots, but I don't recall the brand. Mercedes often used same color wire with varied color stripes way back.

I'm sure that helps immensely when you're faced with 50-500 wires in a group.

Grok that. Ick!

I was playing with the phone line wires once when a call came in. Yeouch! Weren't those 90vac@20Hz? Surprised me. :)

People who don't know what stereo or hi-fi mean, y'mean? Fond old memories of drive-ins, I remember borrowing Mom's '62 Lincoln Continental, complete with suicide doors, to go to the drive-in after I got my license. The front electric seat would to back, down, and tilt back so we could put our feet on the dashboard to watch. Then, when the movie got boring and my girlfriend got friendly, the cushy seats proved long and wide.

What is the acceptable heat, strain and waterproof way to splice them?

--jsw

I've only seen it on telephone cables, not auto wiring. And telephone cable is solid wire, not stranded, so would not survive the vibration of the automotive environment.

Sure -- stripes were easy to make when they made the wire. Not sure why dots were sometimes used by the phone company.

And some striped wire had two stripes, a wide and a narrow one giving three colors.

Well ... 25-pair cables *are* 50 wires, and the dots on solid uniquely marked each wire in that count. (Aside from that, the two wires in a pair were also twisted -- to minimize crosstalk to adjacent pairs.) The twisting helps keep them together so you don't have to search through 49 other wires to find the other half of a pair. :-)

Yep!

Yep -- 80=90 VAC 20 Hz (or 20 CPS in the old days. :-)

I meant the KTU line cards and sub-cycle units.

As for the drive-in speakers -- I wonder how many were uprooted by driving off with them still in the window over the life of the theater? :-)

I didn't have wheels back then -- or a MGA, which really did not have the creature comforts for properly enjoying a drive-in. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

I didn't replace any under-hood looms, just tail and under-fender body, mostly, so heat wasn't an issue. Most often, I soldered in some new wire, wrapped the joint with black tape, and then wound the whole loom area with black tape. I still have the cheap plastic-but-handy gadget which fit around most looms and held a roll of electrician's tape. It allowed me to keep tension on the tape for best seal. I tried to match color, but had none with stripes or dots. Most work was repairing a few severed wires in that small section of the loom, but I had to find them first. Some were evident when the quarter panel, fender, or door was removed. Others hid under the dashboards. I don't remember if it was the old Mercedes sedan or the Porsche 928 dashboard which was my worst nightmare. I took notes and marked placement, but it took them many months from the time I dismantled it until the frame was straightened and parts came in, so I could finally replace the dash. I don't even want to -think- of the positions I had to get my body in to get to hidden blind screws and retainers. My old bod could no longer even attempt those near-dislocations.

Quite handy, that.

Yeah, I grew up with Cycles Per Second, too.

Probably more than the number of gasoline pump hoses ripped out of their pumps.

Some likely stats: 1/2 had their speaker cable ripped out, 1/4 of the speakers broke the window out, and 1/4 of the posts were uprooted.

A friend drove us to work in a floor-holey MGTD one winter. Granted, SoCal ain't frozen tundra, but it was a mite chilly. I wouldn't have considered it a model car for the drive-in, either, despite the vast advances and upgrades from your MGA. ;)

Not only re he pairs twisted, but the twist rate varies from pair to pair to reduce the crosstalk even further. :)

Those phone company guys are pretty smart. I remember reading, in the very early 1980s, an article that explained in great detail why it was physicall y impossible to squeeze more than 1200 bits per second over a voice-grade p hone wire. Then in the early 2000s, I spent a couple of months at Bell Labs , working up test procedures for DSLAM installations.

In each corner of each floor of the building, there was a seating area with a large whiteboard. The boards were covered with math that is far, far bey ond what I could understand. It looked almost cartoonish - like they were m aking fun of math nerds.

But these were the guys who figured out how to cram millions of bits per se cond over that 1200 bit maximum twisted pair. On the other hand, they neede d ME to come in and show them how to, basically, determine whether one end of a wire was connected to the other. only a very small percentage of those guys had a clue which end of a soldering iron to pick up.

u would fail inspection. According to Bellcore standards, ALL cables must b e labeled at each end with flag-type labels which can be read from any dire ction without disconnecting the cable. I spend a few years designing and s upervising the installation of colocation equipment for AT&T. I watched as two cages full of equipment were relabeled at one site.

na put your stuff in it, it has to follow their rules.

It's union work here too (NY, NJ CT). Of the 50 or so offices I was in, onl y one time did I have any issues with the union. They insisted on doing eve rything, with me touching nothing. They took instructions very well, and di d everything right, but it was hands-off for me. In all of the other shops, the union guys didn't care at all who did the actual work. They would do i t or I would do it or we would do it together. I learned a lot from those g uys.

The mathematics of communications theory is the most difficult subject I've tried to learn, worse than Thermodynamics or Nuclear Physics. A good introduction is the encoding on a music CD:

Transmission line math is bad enough:

Thankfully Mitre paid for and provided rooms with TVs, VCRs and phone links to local university night school courses in electrical engineering so I could learn how to do my very challenging job.

--jsw

Each of those would seem to be a single-choice career. Pick one tiny section of one and devote your entire life to learning it. I hope you weren't doing all this concurrently. =:-0

That's a smart move on Mitre's part. How many hours/day were you putting in at that point, between work and school learning+study?

Well, Chemistry isn't easy. It's a very broad field and they cover enough to at least understand the explanations if you go into any area of it. The associated Physics courses taught electronic theory up through waveguide propagation modes and DC and AC network analysis by differential equations. One homework problem was to calculate the capacitance between your hand and the planet Saturn.

It was four full years of coursework and all summer in the lab on research grants, no generalized Freshman and Sophomore years to "find yourself" before choosing a major. I used Theatre to fulfill the Humanities requirement mainly because it was right across the street and there was no homework or exams or socialist BS.

On school nights it was up at 5AM, home after 9PM. On others I did homework until I fell asleep, but I did manage to eat, do laundry and maintain a solid 4.0 in all classes.

--jsw