sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Cabling Telephones Systems Wiring Nice pic of a trunk line.

Can anyone provide any more info on what this is?? [img:left]https://i.imgur.com/7mvPL.jpg[/img]

thanks, it came up ok in the preview....

Not sure how many pairs, but that's a big piece of OSP cable.

My vote is 600 pair.

When I worked outside, on the crew and with a splicer, years ago, I had a couple feet of 600 or 1200 pair cable. I seperated all the binder groups with colored ties. It was pretty impressive when I took it to school when my kids were little. The school had a day where parents came in and talked about their jobs, etc.

Jim

it looks like a 1200 pair, brings back many long lonely cold memories.

God help you if you lost your 'pairing', 'cause nobody else would!

at least it's not western cable w/ no binders

Bunch of tenderfoots. If you mean "Western" cable being paper insulated lead sheathed with NO color code, then you know what a "real" cable splicer does. No crimp on connectors, either. Each wire in a 2,000 or 3,000 pair cable was hand twisted with a minimum of 12 twists and individually insulated with a cambric impregnated cloth "spaghetti" insulator.

In the real world of early cable splicers, there was a large pot of molten lead which was tended by a splicer's helper. The cable splicer was revered among the telephone crafts people as being part scientist and part wizard. I never met of of them which wasn't "meaner than a junk yard dog."

PIC cable is for sissies.

Rcaman

1200-pair, 24-gauge, subscriber (not trunk) cable.

What made you go with 1,200 pair, Arthur? I knew that it was too large to be 600 pair, but I was leaning more toward 1,800 myself.

I agree about the 'trunk cable' part. We just refer to it as exchange cable around here, but that is even older terminology.

I'd forgotten about the lead sleeves and pouring melted lead. I worked with a splicer once in a while. Got to carry sleeves from the truck. Sat there while he had a smoke in the manhole while he worked barehanded with the lead. Wow, those were some days! Funny we don't all have more health problems!

Jim

You may be right, looks at least 1200, but may be 1800.

How long would it take a splicer to connect a cable count like that?

The New York company allows one hour per 100 pairs in a conventional (one in, one out) splice. That includes set up, cutting the enclosure, preparing the cable ends and putting on the group pigtails, using 3M modules for the splicing, at 25 pairs at a time, and doing the final closing up and air-testing.

In reality, once the set up is ready, a good splicer can do 400 pairs (16 modules) an hour. That time is increased slightly when working with paper cable or filled cable.

When working on a cable failure, the rule is "make yourself comfortable" because a comfortable sitting position is conducive to error-free and aesthetically-pleasing work. If you take an extra 15 minutes getting comfortable, it will pay off during the work session, because it you're hot, cold, wet, bent over, lying in the mud at the bottom of a manhole, or stretching your arms over your head, your productivity and accuracy will suffer.

The work order requires that you document time of arrival, time of first pair spliced, last pair spliced, and all finals completed. Too bad it's a dying/dead art, because it was a great job for over a century.

With B- Connectors they used to look for 600 pair in a 7 hour day and would allow a 3% failure rate (which I always felt was too high). My old partner and dear friend Morgan Harris used to do 1,000 pair in a 7 hour day with NO errors/failures, but he was a lunatic and at one time was the fastest splicer in the Bell System.

Lead sleeves took longer.

And absolutely - get comfortable.

Sam

I had a distant cousin who worked as a splicer for Alberta Govt Telephones before the govt sold out to Telus and his biggest fear was cutting into the wrong cable in a dark joint use manhole and finding a high voltage power cable.

I still work with a lot of old school splicers who refuse to use modules. They still splice half a pair at a time with purple picabonds. After opening the splice and setting up the rail, mounting the third hand, and getting the right seat/splice height right they can fly through a splice. Its all personal preference but I think the old picabond system made a prettier splice. It's getting harder and harder to find the old splice tools as it is old but proven technology.

It certainly made a much smaller splice. Those modules take up a lot of room.

Eh, I don't know Bill. 710 modules when nested properly in a splice are mighty tidy. A dual-bank splice can be even tighter. 3M Ms2 modules on the other hand are enormous and take up more room than using Scotchloks from my experience with them. Those things are huge!

I've never touched or even seen a Picabond connector (they were never used in this area by Bell as far as I've seen). In our former Contel territories (taken over by GTE in 1991), they always used Scotchloks but GTE switched to Ms2 later.

Now that everything Bell Atlantic and GTE are Verizon, 710 is the standard splicing method in these parts.

Wow, what a side-track!

Speaking of Picabonds, I have a swimming pool that was "made possible by a generous grant" from that company.

There was a class-action against that product that resulted in large cash pay-outs to anyone who could document use over a certain number of years. The tool causes carpal tunnel injuries when used over a long period.

Modules are faster and smaller, make a picture-perfect splice, and are easier to trouble-shoot. Just because some Luddites want to sit and do one wire at a time, when people a lot smarter than all of us have come up with a much neater and efficient system, doesn't mean it's the better way.

I've never used the 710 machine; almost all my splicing was done either with B-Connectors or with the MS2 machine. A couple of times I used picabonds and at the end of my career I used the Scotch UG/UR/UY connectors.

And then there was one time when I used those plastic sleeves that replaced the cotton sleeving dipped in wax.

The 3M MS2 required ordering a garbage pail to fit around the splice. I never liked them. I liked B-connectors, picabonds and the Scotch connectors. They made a nice small splice.


Sam

<3 OSP materials, workmanship, and info.

I'm with you Sam. Never saw a mod splice I thought looked worth a darn. Also seem to have more failures in them. The really look like crap in a ped. B connectors for the most part and twist and solder. I did use the mods but didn't like them.

I talked with an old Bell Telephone splicer that I used to work with in 1970. He is a year away from retirement with Verizon. After trying to remember all the "dead" guys we used to work with, he told me he was one of a very few splicers that still did lead. He spliced a 3,000 pair cable in downtown Pittsburgh last Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. That's right. 4 days. He had a splicer's helper and went through 3 different switchmen in the CO. It was one of the last lead cables in the city streets and it was being half tapped to a new PIC cable. Paper to plastic. Interesting what he was required to use. It turns out the "new" guys don't want to try and deal with the individual splices so there is a "transition" splice (he called it a blade) that paper goes in one side and PIC in the other. 25 pairs at a time. The splice case is enormous and the splices look terrible, but this is how it is today. Next year, when he retires, there will only be 4 guys left that know how to splice lead in the Pittsburgh area.

Rcaman

No, I don't think that the "blade" is entirely unique. It sounds more like a 710TC1 module that plugs onto the side of a typical 710 SC1 or SD1 straight-splice module. These are frequently used for half-tapping cables (hence the 'T' in the nomenclature). Once the cut-over is complete, the tap modules are either removed or the old cable pairs are just pulled from them.

Typical scenario: The feed cable is brought in and terminated on the bottom of the 710 module. The new replacement cable is terminated on the top of it. The tap module is installed by plugging it into the side of this 710 module.

The old cable's pairs are terminated on the tap module to carry the circuits through during the transition, but not cut yet.

Once the same thing is repeated at the far end, the tap module is removed. This is a remarkably simple means to make such a transition with zero circuit disruption in my book.

Nay sayers! 710 is an amazingly flexible cable splicing system.

That looks reasonable and is probably what he was talking about. I learned, early on, splicers have their own jargon and, sometimes, it is only intelligible to other splicers and it varies by region.

Of course, if one breathes in enough lead fumes, language and reasoning become an art instead of a necessity.

Rcaman

We had a cable cut at one of our offices last year. I got to watch the guy splice 100 pairs together with the MS2 system. He was sitting on a seat, in a large puddle of water, smoking cigarettes, splicing away!