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Thursday, April 06, 2023

Why I never wanted to cross train as a cable splicer in the Army


 

17 comments:

  1. Blue
    Orange
    Green
    Brown
    Slate

    White
    Red
    Black
    Yellow
    Violet

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    1. i was taught
      0 black
      1 brown
      2 red
      3 orange
      4 yellow
      5 green
      6 blue
      7 violet
      8 grey
      9 white
      the memory aid is "bad boys rape our young girls but violet gives willingly"
      and if you need more, stripes are added following the same method.
      that line is gonna take a day or three to splice.

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    2. We built on the old Roy G Biv for the color spectrum to be Big Bag Roy G Biv Got Wasted . Used it for remembering resistor codes way back when I still did electronics.

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    3. Indeed those two 5 color sequences are all that is needed to sort it. 5 pair, then 5 bundles of 5 pair, then 5 bundles of bundles, etc.

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  2. Fixing cables for radio comms was my least favorite thing to do as an electronics tech in the Corps and they were usually less than 32 wires. Usually we would just toss them, but there are times new ones weren't available

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  3. For a split second I thought it was a huge bowl of fruit loops.

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    1. If the splicer screws up the color code or bundle sequence, fruit loops would work better. I used to do those cables sitting on a milk crate in a manhole in NYC. The test for the job was to look at a cable that the interviewer had in his hand and correctly identify the colors he picked out.

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  4. You want to experience a real job? Try pulling a paper wrapped, with ground wire, 256 pair cable, by hand, 100 feet along an overhead cable tray ten feet off the floor. Took three of us about three hours. Then, terminate both ends to the distribution tree and soldering them in place. That little chore took two of us about a week mixed in with regular and emergency maintenance of the comm equipment. ET3, Nav Comm Sta Argentia NFLD, 1966.

    Nemo

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    Replies
    1. Copper certainly has gravity. Hats off to ya though. Biggest I ever did was a 120 pair and that was a pita.

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  5. It all boils down to "Tip & Ring". I worked for the old Bell System in the 70s, 80s & 90s

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  6. I worked in telecom for forty years, cut down many a MDF/IDF. Despite being Red/Green partially color blind. I may not see colors correctly, but different colors look different to me and I could still separate them.
    Still it was a relief to start working with data.

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  7. I worked with a lot of the 33 pair (66 wire) cables when I was doing broadcast engineering work. Each wire had a base color and a stripe color. I suspect that there are multiple stripes on each wire with a cable this size.

    We used the 66 punch down blocks in conjunction with the cables and a standardized position for each color combination. It made documentation and troubleshooting much easier than any other system I had seen.

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  8. I wire wrapped plenty of 900 pair cables back in the late 80's and I remember it as

    White - We
    Red - Rape
    Black - Beautiful
    Yellow - Young
    Violet - Virgins

    Blue - Because
    Orange - Our
    Green - Girls
    Brown - Became
    Slate - Sluts
    But every group of 25 pair had their own streamer to separate them. That mess in the photo looks like a lot of fun.

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  9. 600 pair cable, it takes about 14 hours to cross connect them for a switch. T

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  10. A 600 pair cable. A bit tedious but it took about 14 hours to punch down that cable to a switch. I hated 600 pair cable.

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  11. I thought someone was about to make a big batch of purple drank

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