Everything Else

I though some of you might get a kick out of how obsessively well organized our customers at work insist that our wire runs be...

You don't have a contract with Apple, do you?

Cool. That was standard practice in the forties and fifties though. Take apart an old machine tool some day - it's all like that. Really beautifully done.

Now we have shit. Business logic strikes again.

Nah, this one wasn't for Apple it was for a much smaller organization - the US Navy...

And though I'd like to say we did it so nicely because of our dedication to the craft, the true reason is much less altruistic, cost plus...

Thought I recognized the (smaller) MIL connectors -- D38999 series?

Yep, thirty eight triple nine, or as I like to refer to them, the bane of my existence...

Some of the stuff I get to play with. Nothing you would want to eat off of but I wouldn't call it a total mess. Just the Real World (tm)

True dat, the US Navy's anything but real world...

No covers over the line fuses? I'm not sure OSHA would approve!

Looks like its in a NEMA enclosure, so guessing covers not necessary. Similar to stuff I used to do. Allen Bradley PLC's?

That's probably because they didn't want electrons falling out of their path on sharp corners
(this is only partially a joke, there exists a method of eavesdropping on multimode fiber links by bending it and catching electrons that didn't make it)

Cheers

I'm trying to put a date on it, but vishnu's phots are what control panels were like in the fifties. Maybe even nicer ... double-wall cabinets, Square D or Allen-Badly relays mounted solidly to a plate bolted to the back wall on standoffs, wiring all laid beautifully parallel making square corners, looked like the lines faked out on deck when a (naval) ship comes into port. It was hard to work on that stuff because if you had to replace a wire, it was impossible to make it look anywhere near as good as the non-college-educated low-skills electricians at the factory.

Most everything before the mid-sixties looked like that. Then things started getting miniature, relays went into sockets, the wiring started going into crappy-ass plastic cable runs where the dumb covers would only snap on a few times before all the prongs started breaking off, you'd open the door to find all the covers lying on the floor. And people pull bunches of wires through gaps between the fingers, it gets ugly.

Then they went to that fucking useless cheap Euro-rail crap like in guardian's photo, which is even worse and less reliable. It's absolute junk. Get a machine that's travelled any distance and it's all loose, falling off, lying on the floor, hanging by its wires, broken, non-functional. But they made a proooofit !!

It's pretty rare to see a nice wiring job now. An acquaintance worked at Cray and says that Seymour was personally just a real hardass old biddy about stuff like that. Cool

Thanks for the photo, vish. Nice to see that someone still insists on good work. if you ever get a chance, look at the relay logic on electro-pneumatic theatre pipe organs from the thirties. Thousands and thousands of wires beautifully laid out just like your naval exercise and pneumatically switched*. Very cool.

*Some of the consoles have sections done with soft lead piping, even cooler but not good for the health. Lovely work, though.

What is it, and why is it built inside a box that appears to be 4-6mm thick metal?

The date on these is 1961 but have no fear, we still wire 'em all up like this...



It's a train and elevation test switch for a 5-inch Navy deck gun, built to the usual Navy "make it indestructible" standards...

^ nice quality & best!

haven't seen anything this neat in ages (my father is a retired electrician)

if your handiwork is still like that, next round o' drinks on me vish :)

Tanqueray on the rocks with a Piquillo pepper stuffed Manzanilla olive please...

I always love seeing work like this. Really easy to snake large amounts of cable around but a total headache when one of the wires become problematic.

shopped!

Ha ha, nope, but I actually do have Photoshop 3 on my octane...

almost my kind of poizen, you've got it vish :)

Telco electromechanical switching unit from the 60's, timely grabbed on the back of a metal recycler truck when a central office moved to digital TDM in 1990.
I should have recorded the amazing sound atmosphere of these CO's where my dad worked, during busy hours with tens to hundreds of linear and rotary relays clicking everywhere at the pace of dial pulses from analog phones. Visiting at night with lights off and fewer dials was fun too. The replacing Alcatel stuff was deadly silent and had not enough blinkenlights.


Size: compare with USB stick (containing bootable FreeBSD and Asterisk)