On Friday, October 16, 2015 at 9:47:46 PM UTC-5, philo wrote:
On 10/16/2015 06:42 PM, Unquestionably Confused wrote:
On 10/16/2015 5:38 PM, philo wrote:
On 10/16/2015 05:28 PM, trader_4 wrote:
[snip]


Once copper is heated it actually goes through a chemical change and
becomes copper oxide. If the burned portion is cleaned, the copper still
has a tarnished look to it.


If you cut a new copper wire and compare it to a cut, tarnished wire you
will see the difference.


That's why I said all must be replaced.


If some hardware was replaced that ended up actually being OK, no harm
done.

I think all see the corollary.

If it's copper, I'll check to you as the authority. If it's AL as is
the bulk of underground feeds over the past 45 years or so, is it the
same deal with arcing.

The only thing I'm going with is DON'T mess with that service drop while
it's live. Period!

If it's AL on the drop, you're definitely going to have to clean it up,
recoat with the anti-oxidant paste and really crank it down. IIRC
correctly those lugs are fitted with an Allen socket. Just way too much
that can go wrong screwing around there even if you didn't have to pull
the wire out to clean and re-coat.

He can, in the end, do whatever he wants. His widow can report back
where he went wrong.








Worked on a lot high-powered transformers and if copper I could usually
fix them by cutting back to clean copper and putting on a new lug.

Eventually I gave up on aluminum because no matter what I did, the
connection would burn out again. I might have had better luck though if
I used anti-oxidant paste. Too late now, I'm retired.

I've used the anti-oxidation paste (Ideal Noalox) on copper connections in areas where there may be condensation, steam or a possibility of the connections getting wet from pressure washing. If you're concerned about any moisture getting into crimp butt splices that would never normally get wet and you don't want to put heat shrink tubing on everything, you can squirt some Noalox into all the crimp connectors before you install then. All of the large al/cu rated crimp lugs and butt connectors I've used already had ant-oxidation paste in them from the factory. ^_^

[8~{} Uncle Butt Monster