Michael A. Terrell wrote:

Mark Allread wrote:

And there you have it. I work with cabling in a TV station, requiring no
more than a dozen pieces done at any given time, and you work with small
wiring inside a chassis on an assembly line, doing hundreds. Each
function has its own equipment needs.

But a butane lighter - especially the "jet" types that behave like tiny
brazing torches - will flame downward well enough, unless they're built
to draw fuel only while upright.

I removed the "Hot air" tip from a butane soldering iron once, and found
it even faster than the lighter, but it required more care in use. If
one tipped it the wrong way, the flame would flare due to it drawing
liquid instead of gas butane.


I used a lot of clear heatshrink to label cables for TV stations and
CATV headends. I preferred to label it before it was inside a rack,
whenever possible.


Indeed - whenever possible. That's how I put in the replacement
Production switcher, after all.

When the cable is to be run through the length of the building, through
tight support brackets already crammed with cable, it is sometimes best
to run one cable at a time and then label each when finished. Heh, time
for a little walk down memory lane...

Ah, the weeks I spent pulling obsolete cable out of that installation,
trying to make room for new cable... Whoever had worked there before me
had left quite a lot of work undocumented... There are few greater sins.

My Chief Engineer cracked up when I mentioned that "there is something
fundamentally wrong with any job that requires knee pads and a
squeeze-bottle of (cable) lube."

Still, by the time I was finished, the digital stuff was in and the
analog stuff (at least that which we no longer needed) was out. I even
built a set of shelves in the basement to hold the obsolete analog
equipment we hadn't sold or scrapped yet, and I carried the stuff down
and filled those shelves.

It was an interesting two years at that station, and then they laid off
more than half the staff, myself included. Ah, such is life.

Those cables were installed well, labeled well, and documented well.
And a lot of equipment that wasn't working, was, by the time I was done.

And now I'm a college student on the Dislocated Worker plan.

I imagine I'm in good company here.