wrote in message
...
On Fri, 5 Feb 2016 04:31:33 -0500, "Texas Kingsnake"
wrote:

I am having my electrician buddy help me replace an old circuit box in a
fairly old house. Much of the wiring is old and cloth covered from the
40's. What happens if one of the wires we are replacing breaks or is too
short to reach the breakers in the new panel? Do those broken wires have
to
be spliced with wire nuts to a new piece of wire and then the splice
section
mounted in a new junction box outside of the new panel? That could get
ugly
very quickly but my limited knowledge of the NEC says splices have to be
with approved connectors and inside junction boxes.


You just apply the wirenuts inside the breaker box. That box is a
(junction box) as far as the code. Of course try to get the wires to
breakers that are possible to do without splicing if possible.

That's up to Lady Luck at the moement. It may mean rearranging the wires
from the current scheme.

Unless this has changed in recent years, you CAN put heat shrink over
old wires, as long as they are not bare from insulation breakdown.
That old cloth covered wire was pretty durable, except if it was exposed
to heat, like in boxes above enclosed light bulbs. Then it got real dry
and often broke off the wire. Modern LED and CF bulbs would not be such
a heat problem, but the old filament bulbs were tough on those wires.

A lot of old tube type electronics also used that cloth wire, and some
had very high voltages.

The problem, other than age, was that these cloth covered wires entered the
box directly above the 100A breaker that was generating a lot of heat for
who knows how long because of the bad connection. The feed into the 100A
breaker starting sparking - it turns out that the set screw on hot feed from
meter stripped - right now my electrician friend's got it patched with a
tapered piece of stranded 10 gage wire shoved into the hole to eliminate any
air gaps. That's held for quite a while but it is now time to "do it
right!" I guess we won't know how bad the wires really are until we
disconnect them all.

Thanks for you help, Paint.

TKS