19 Feb
2004
19 Feb
'04
11:25 p.m.
At 12:49 AM 2/20/04 -0500, you wrote:
At one of the jobs that I had at MMC we had a bunch of Macs, PCs, HPs
running Unix and a mix of other computers all in one office. We had them
all networked together with a hodge-podge networks to transfer data from
one to another and there were cables dangling all over the place. The
office was made up of the movable partitions and the cables were just
strung along the walls and over the partitions. They were a real mess,
people were always tripping over them and they'd fall off the partitions
and knock things over. I finally got tired of it so I went to work EARLY
one morning and brought a roll of lacing tape with me. I straightened out
the cables and run them along the top of the partition walls. I then pulled
the snap-on covers off the top of the partitions and laced the cables to
the covers and then snapped them back in place. It really cleaned up the
place. The rest of the crew was quite impressed when they came to work and
found all the cables up out of the way and neatly tied down. I don't think
they'd ever seen cables TIED down before.
> The wires would them be cut to length, stripped,
tinned (coated with
solder)
and placed
onto the board. Lacing cord would then be usig to tie the wires
together (I can still do a half decent running stitch, but can not find any
waxed lacing cord....).
You still can buy it, as the telco people use it. The Ace hardware at the
ground floor of 60 Hudson St. (New York telco and networking folk should
know this place) actually had rolls on the shelves.
I can still stitch up things with the cord, but I am not fast like the
old timers. Way back at USR, we were given a contract to built the first
AT&T Worldnet dialup cabinets. Being Bell, lacing was specified (along
with *every* last detail, unlike the "pound to fit, paint to match"
engineering that was AOL Big Dial dialup). I was the only one at USR that
could lace up harnesses, so I spent something like six hours on one
cabinet. Out of 240. People were not happy. We convinced AT&T to just use
tiewraps.
The best lacing job I have ever seen is on World War 2 submarine power
panels. Essentially, it is a standard stitch, but there is NO space
between the loops. You can not see the wires thru the lacing.
Must have been a union job!
Everyone at the company that I worked for prided themselves on the neat
cabling jobs that they did. All the cable turns were perfect and there was
never any slack anywhere in their cable runs. Then they got a job wiring up
instrumentation in one of the block houses at Kennedy Space Center. They
spent a couple of weeks on the job and it was THE best and neatest job that
they'd ever done. Then the KSC inspectors came in to check it. They looked
at the cabling and commented about how neat it was and then told them to
tear it out and start over! They'd forgotten to tell them that the block
house (or that room at least) was on springs and could move up to a foot
and half. They had to tear out all the cable and redo it and leave 3 foot
loops of slack cable to allow for movement of the block house. C'est La Vie!
Joe
William Donzelli
aw288(a)osfn.org