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Unusual / Interesting cable or wire installations

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vagrant

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Popping a hole in a wall, or passing a line through a window or doorway is typically not much to write home about. Some installations are a nightmare. Other installations went well due to some creative thinking. While I have destroyed fish tape on a pull, I have lucked out other times back in the day with some creative thinking by using a remote control toy car with a flashlight on top, and even a child's bow and arrow set to run a pull string on runs above false ceilings.

Whether wire, ethernet, or coaxial installations, what are some experiences you have dealt with, or know of, so that others can gain from it? Alternatively, share an install that went bad and why, as we can learn from mistakes as well. ( Not your mistake of course. It was some guy you worked with ;) )
 

mmckenna

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Oh, jeez, if I'd taken photos of some of the installs I'd seen in my 30 years, I could fill a whole website. When I got my start, I was pulling fiber, CAT 5, fire alarm, electrical, anything.

-Pulling a previous installed fiber out of an underground duct since our OTDR was showing a failure between two manholes. The original contractor blaming us for "pulling over their fiber". When we got the fiber out, there was the broken strands, with electrical tape wrapped around them. Either original contractor was lying, or they had well trained rats that could run down a duct and wrap electrical tape around the break.

- Inside data wiring performance tests where all the thousands of cables magically passed the first time, and all are miraculously the exact same length.

- A million similar findings through the years...

- Most recent was a failed telephone cable at one of our remote sites. Past the demarc, so it was ours. The guys that run the site asked for my cable recommendation since the existing cable had been damaged by a wildland fire. I forwarded the request to our OSP engineer. She gave them three recommendations for cable type, quotes and where to purchase it. A few months later, they call back. Phones are acting up, please come and help us. I drive down (all day trip), and find that they ignored the OSP engineers recommendation and bought MonoPrice CAT5 cable and pulled it in. I come back a week later with a reel of the stuff our OSP engineer recommended and help them pull it in. Magically all the phones start working again. The original cable had melted in places. The CAT5 they had replaced it with had fallen apart in the underground conduit and we had a heck of a time getting the old stuff out since the jacket was so brittle. Due to the location, all pulling had to be done by hand. I haven't done that sort of stuff in years, so I was sore for about a week afterwards.

- More radio related: Getting ready to do 800MHz rebanding and one of my guys and I go out to get radio information out of a bus fleet. One mini-bus with an 800MHz Spectra that needs to be replaced. But I can't see an antenna on the roof. Started tracking down the coaxial cable, follow it up into the overhead compartment above the driver, finally find the antenna and about 10 feet of coaxial cable all bundled up and ty-wrapped to the clearance light wiring harness. Apparently the bus guys decided that the Motorola shop was too expensive and started using the local stereo shop for radio installs.

- Some of the worst wiring jobs I've seen are from local Wireless ISP's. They always look like someone vomited cable all over the place.

- And don't get me started on some of the ham installations I've seen. I've found a few of their repeater sites that look pretty bad, and some mobile installs that make you wonder why the vehicle hasn't burst into flames yet. (Fuses? Who needs fuses?)
 

mmckenna

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Oldest house I ran wiring in was from 1830s, learned a few good tricks.
  • right angle drill adaptor
  • those really long auger bits make it easy for getting thru wall sill plates
  • Something like this. - I've gone thru a couple, but you tape them about 2 inches back from the end of a fish tape and then you can litereally see where you're going in the wall.

Wish we'd had those cameras when I was doing that stuff.

I ran a lot of fiber/CAT5 at/under UC Berkeley in my earlier days. They had a lot of late 1800's buildings that were really fun to run wire through.
A few times we had to run fiber through steam tunnels. Would send a guy down for about 10 minutes, then rotate another tech in there. Would be 130ºf in there. Glad I don't do that stuff anymore.
 

prcguy

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When pulling through long underground conduit runs we've attached a pull string to a ball of puffy cotton like material, stuffed it in one end then used a vacuum cleaner at the other end to suck it through the entire 100+ ft conduit run within a few seconds. We've also had to use cable grease on long coax pulls through conduit, especially if there is some existing cable in the conduit. You have a guy at the feed in end with rubber gloves and a bucket of grease slathering it on and it just fixes everything.

There are commercial fishing tools available but I've used a 33ft fiberglass telescoping antenna mast, also used as an RV flag pole to shoot cables across a dropped ceiling. Tie the cable to the end of the mast and start extending horizontally above the ceiling and you can get the wire to its destination very fast and accurately.
 

belvdr

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When pulling through long underground conduit runs we've attached a pull string to a ball of puffy cotton like material, stuffed it in one end then used a vacuum cleaner at the other end to suck it through the entire 100+ ft conduit run within a few seconds.
I saw that on Ask This Old House once. Brilliant way to pull it through quickly.
 

kb4mdz

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Cary, NC
Oy.

New water tank in the county, it will tie in with the muni water system which is on its own RF SCADA, that my shop maintained. Electrical contractor called us to buy the Heliax , about 150 feet of 3/4" We suggested he allow us to run it, saying 'You kink it, it's useless!' Nahh, we'll be careful, man! Week and a half later, same sub calls up our service manager, to purchase new cable, and run it up the tank's conduit.

Favorite of all time: Another water system, using UHF for about a 4 site SCADA. Many things conspired (QRM to & from other systems, unreliability) to replace it; went 900MHz SS links. 1 site worked ok with new radio system, good RSSI from its partner site, but would randomly stop. Visit - radio was in SWR shutdown. Reboot make it sing again. Yes, SWR of 95 ft. of 1/2 hardline showed good, great RSSI still. Rinse, repeat a few times until I brought out the TDR - About 25 feet from the radio was a huge long hump in the sweep. Proposed replacement cable and when we pulled the old out of the 4 inch conduit that 25 ft region looked like it had been run over by trucks. Huhh?? Turns out installing shop years before had never put a cap on the far end of the conduit, it collected rainwater because it was shaped like a U. Winters would come, water would freeze, forming a plug at each water surface; more freezing would force the remaining water down at high pressure and crush the cable. Bye bye reliability.

Took over doing cop car installs for a local uni; most of them had a mass of scrambled wiring under passenger floor mat, generally with a 14 ga thru the firewall; then multiply spliced to 10 ga, 8 ga, or others. Two words: Fire hazard. (BTW, we were getting the work because the uni's PD chief used his buddy's radio shop, then the chief was found to be umm, adjusting funding in non-approved ways.)

Hardline, draped over top of sodium-vapor light fixtures. Wanna guess how hot those babies get? And what that does to the dielectric over time?

The list goes on and on.

PS: I still have some of that crushed cable as a souvenir. 🙃
 

prcguy

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Never pull anything through an existing conduit with fiber! I worked with manager who should have never been put in management and his job in his mind was to make my life as miserable as possible. He managed a technical team and I was engineering so he usually did the opposite of what I requested or did nothing to help at all. I usually did my own physical work but on one of my projects his team was tasked to pull some coax from a main building out to a commo type shelter away from the building.

There were several conduit runs between the building and shelter and all with something in them. I didn't care how he got the coax to the shelter except for saying whatever you do, don't run it in the conduit with the existing fiber, which by the way had live satellite traffic on it with customers watching. After being told I don't know what I'm talking about and to stay out of it they pulled some LMR400 sized coax runs through the existing conduit full of multistrand fiber. Sometime the day of the pull alarms started going off and I find several satellite uplinks are dead and several fiber links are out.

I had enough spare fibers to patch around it and get back on the air but we had to pull a new multistrand fiber, call a company to come in and terminate all the tiny fibers and test each run and that wasn't cheap. Somehow this hole lasted a couple more years in his management position before being demoted and moved to another facility. But the moral of this story is, don't mess with any existing fiber!
 

vagrant

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In the late 90’s early 2000 that fiber was magnetic! It could pull a backhoe shovel down into the earth and sever itself. Cars would drive into telephone poles with that magnetic fiber strung on it. Oh, and back in the day it was like watching a brain surgeon working the fiber.
 

k7ng

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I worked with manager who should have never been put in management and his job in his mind was to make my life as miserable as possible.
I wonder if he gets around a lot or there are a few hundred clones. I worked for one of them.
 

prcguy

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While the guy was working at another one of our facilities he had a heart attack. During his recovery he called me one day out of the blue and apologized up and down for all the trouble he caused me and later at company gatherings we sat together a few times and chatted about some common hobbies we have, so we were kind of on good terms at that point.

He also owned a lot of guns and had a short fuse so when he got laid off company security notified me "just in case" and they also had his picture posted at our guard shack. There was even a discussion about avoiding certain areas at our facility that were in the clear of a high-rise parking structure across the street, in case "somebody" were to start shooting from up there. He eventually had another heart attack and passed away.

What does this have to do with wire installations? Nothing I can think of.

I wonder if he gets around a lot or there are a few hundred clones. I worked for one of them.
 
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KK4JUG

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I think the statute of limitations has run by now so I can talk about this.

Back in the 70s, I worked at a commercial FM station in Montgomery, AL. It was a 24-hour MOR station that also broadcast background music on a subcarrier. We were a pretty low budget station and couldn't afford to pay a jock for the overnight shift so, at the behest of management, I devised a system to play music and still include station IDs and PSAs.

Back then, stations used NAB Type II tape cartridges to play commercials, PSAs, etc. These were sold to the public as 4-track cartridges but, like Beta VCRs, they didn't catch on. Most had about 3 or 4 minutes worth of tape in them but some had as much as 30 minutes. Once started, "cue" tones prior to the next message were used to stop the tape and closing a NO switch would start them. This was usually a button on the front but there were also contacts on the back that could be wired. We recorded an abundance of PSAs and station IDs on a 30-minute cartridge.

For a timer, I used a standard 12" electric office clock. Small pieces of metal tape were placed on the face of the clock at 3, 6, 9 and 12. A piece of wire was connected to each piece of tape. A solid copper wire was attached to the minute hand and bent in such a way as to barely touch the face of the clock and the tapes attached to the face. Another piece of wire was added to the clock mechanism housing and it was all wired so that when connected to the contacts on the back of the cartridge player, it closed the NO switch and the tape would play when the minute hand would pass over the metal tape.

Our music consisted of the background music on the subcarrier. That came from phonograph records that played at 16 1/3 rpm in an automated machine. The cartridge volume would override the music.

This was "MacGyvered" before MacGyver was born. It was 50 years ago.

Please don't ask about the hourly meter readings on the transmitter. Let's just say, if the FCC checked them, they would be complete. Back than, I had to have a 3rd Class Radiotelephone license to "operate" the transmitter as well as read the meters.

I won't talk about keeping cups of coffee warm by putting them on the final output tubes of the transmitter at another station. We had a "cheater" cord on the door so the transmitter wouldn't shut off when the door was opened. The statute of limitations has run on that one, too.
 

RFI-EMI-GUY

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While the guy was working at another one of our facilities he had a heart attack. During his recovery he called me one day out of the blue and apologized up and down for all the trouble he caused me and later at company gatherings we sat together a few times and chatted about some common hobbies we have, so we were kind of on good terms at that point.

He also owned a lot of guns and had a short fuse so when he got laid off company security notified me "just in case" and they also had his picture posted at our guard shack. There was even a discussion about avoiding certain areas at our facility that were in the clear of a high-rise parking structure across the street, in case "somebody" were to start shooting from up there. He eventually had another heart attack and passed away.

What does this have to do with wire installations? Nothing I can think of.

QUOTE="k7ng, post: 3628990, member: 179784"]
I wonder if he gets around a lot or there are a few hundred clones. I worked for one of them.
[/QUOTE]

He probably was on a 12 step program when he called you out of the blue. I had a problematic neighbor that showed up one day to finish some heavy yard work while I was gone, then showed up later at the door to apologize for his many years of asshattery. Thankfully he has moved far away.

Yeah, sniper threat, that is pretty specific, you must have been on his target list!
 

RFI-EMI-GUY

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Oldest house I ran wiring in was from 1830s, learned a few good tricks.
  • right angle drill adaptor
  • those really long auger bits make it easy for getting thru wall sill plates
  • Something like this. - I've gone thru a couple, but you tape them about 2 inches back from the end of a fish tape and then you can litereally see where you're going in the wall.
Can you recommend a specific borescope that has worked well? I could use one here for a number of projects.
 

a417

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Messages
4,650
Can you recommend a specific borescope that has worked well? I could use one here for a number of projects.

Most of them are chinesium junk, and they're only on the usual suspects websites for a year or so before they get rebranded and show up with a new name. This one I bought back in 2014 lasted the longest, but they are dirt cheap. I can't emphasize how cheap they are. It even got stuck to a point where I gave it a good rip out of frustration and yanked the camera assembly out of the housing and pulled it back. The housing fell into the floor sill plate, where I retrieved it with a magnet. Some hot snot and a wire tie and it lasted another 2 years. I always liked that one the best, as it had a thumb-wheel on the plug that allowed easy adjustment of the LEDs at the distal end, worked well when it was 6 feet into fiberglass and everything was washed out on the screen, due to light saturation

The cheap ones enumerate to your OS as a webcam, and that makes it exceptionally easy to use. I would imagine if you spent 3 or 4 digits on a device like this, it might be a little more dependant on a specfic driver. One of them even came with a little USB A female to USB-C male dongle which allowed my android phone to recognize it and show the picture, although I preferentially used my laptop's significantly larger screen.

They last a couple of years, I definitely get my money's worth out of them for what they cost. 3 or 4 total over the last decade, never spent more than $20.
 
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