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On Sat, 02 Apr 2011 00:35:39 -0500, The Daring Dufas
wrote:

On 4/1/2011 9:14 PM, Robert Green wrote:
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All but the very oldest BX cable had a flat bonding conductor inside
that was to be used, NOT the sheath.


** FYI, AC cable was invented at the turn of the century by Gus
Johnson
and
Harry Greenfield. "BX" was never a code designation, just a name given
to
AC
cable made by GE's Sprague division. The bonding conductor wasn't
required
until the 1959 Nec and was never used as a ground, only to assure a
clean
grounding path against the metal coils of the sheath

Grew up watching my Dad use it (was required in NYC at the time
'50-'70) but
may not be now. Never heard it called anything but BX cable. (-: I
guess
it's one of those things like Kleenex or Xerox. The tradename
overtakes the
common name. I can still remember moving south and seeing Romex for
the
first time. Oops. I mean non-metallic sheathed cable from the Rome
wire
company.

--
Bobby G.



The Romex my dad taught me about had plastic insulated conductors
covered with some kind of jacket that was silver and looked sort
of like fish scales. It was some sort of fiber reinforced paper,
possibly tar paper with a silver finish. We wired the family home
with it back in the 1950's and 1960's. Darn, I'm getting old. :-)

TDD
My dad was an electrician, and when he came home after working all day
with Romex, particularly on a hot summer day, he was BLACK.
Was he ever happy when they came out with the plastic sheathed
stuff!!! That old stuff was NASTY.

I have one run of it in the basement where the previous owner's son built a
room - probably in the '60s and I always wondered WTF is this stuff? Never
seen it before nor since. It really is odd looking stuff compared to what
came before and what came after.

In this case, it was two conductor without ground and a neutral drawn from a
different circuit because he was tapping off an existing lighting circuit to
create a wall outlet. sigh He also paneled the room using furring
strips, no insulation or prep and banging holes into weak cinderblock with
nails that did a lot of damage. I guess you have to learn somewhere. When
I built a darkroom in my parent's basement my plumbing and electrical work
didn't look very professional, either.

The rest is old 1940 cloth wiring and my newer blue NM 12 w/G. Bought two
250' reels in 1985 from Hechinger's for $28 - still half plenty of it left.
I wonder what it costs now? Rewiring an old, small Cape Cod doesn't take a
lot of wire, just a lot of patience. Now at least every circuit that draws
more that 10A is on the newer wire. The cloth is still holding up, but it
doesn't tolerate a lot of fussing with. But it runs to the attic and then
drops down to the various rooms. It was easier to leave that in place and
to simply add new runs from the basement to the kitchen and other places
where I didn't want to take a chance pulling 15A for space heaters, central
vacuum., radial arm saw, etc. on the old cloth wire.

--
Bobby G.