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Whatiz??

Started by Stockdale, April 23, 2011, 05:39:45 PM

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Stockdale

Hello all,
Thought I would post a Whatiz and see if there are any old phone men like me on here.   ;D
Do all of you know what the object in the photos is?  ???
They are both alike, but one has the end ready to use.  The other one, has the end in the stowed position...  They were commonly used in the phone business not all that long ago.  Most trucks would have carried some.  We went thru them pretty regular.   :o
Look forward to your answers.  ;D

Weco355aman

They are test probes, used in Central office or Key/pbx System.
Also could be use by cable techs and others that understood how to use them for troubleshooting.
Phil

Stockdale

WECO,
Your correct.  The one on the left, or bottom is ready to go.  It has a set of needle like pins on one end, used for jamming in insulation to test continuity of the conductor.  Didn't have to peel back the insulation to do this. 
We used them on lead cable to read the cable from one end to the other.  In case you didn't know, lead cable has/had paper insulation over copper wire.  This paper cover was not color coded.  So if any cut was made of the cable, it had to be read from both directions to make sure that pair 1 "A" wire, was pair 1 "A" wire on the other end.  We did this using 2 tech, one at the CO end, and the other at the repair/splice.  The first thing you needed to do is find a working pair from the repair/splice back to the CO, to tie a pair of sound powered headphones down on.  This way you could talk back and fourth, one person grounding the "A"wire with the probe to ground, and the other person finding the ground on a wire at the CO end.  This would tell you what pair, and wire you had. 
There are a set of cards with holes in them numbered from 1-25, (up to #500 if needed) that went along with these probes, and once you found the pair number (from the end still tied down) you would poke the pair in the correct hole and give it twist.  That way when you were ready to splice, you knew which wires were pairs and needed to be spliced together.   :)
When we were ready to make the splice/repair, we would slip a wax covered sleeve over one end of the a/b  wire, grab the other end of the a/b wire and twist it together, solder it, and push the wax sleeve over the bare copper solder joint, and go on to the next wire.  200 pair cable took quite a while to do this way.  After all pairs in the cable were back and soldered, there was a lead sleeve that went back over the whole  cable and this sleeve was worked down to a bullet shape on each end, over the existing lead of the cable.  Next you went to work with a soldering iron, torch and lead pot and re-soldered the sleeve to the cable.  I took a lot of practice to get the sleeve looking acceptable, but with lead cables and rain, you got a LOT of practice quick!   :D 
Spent a lot of my early career repairing lead cable, and was glad to see it go.   ;D  But in some ways lead cable was better than plastic for finding/making repairs.  Most of this "lead technology" is gone now, and most of the technicians that did this kind of work are drawing retirement money, so it has become something of a lost art.  I just came across the pair of probes, and it brought back a whole lot of early memories.  Though some might enjoy.   ;)