Why is an easy repair never quick and easy? (with pics!)

[dragoneggs]

Some more ideas and a bit of humor at the end:

Pretty good but he has easy access to both sides with his demo wall. It's not that accessible in real life. Climbing through an attic porthole and finding your drop point, then climbing down to work from the wall below and then climbing back up because something is hung up, then climbing back down... gets old in a hurry.

Ideally a two person job but my wife won't loiter around waiting for me to get my act together!

 

[MossRoad]

Well there's the beauty of living in a 100 year old house with balloon construction and little wall insulation. :laughing:

At my old employer I ran hundreds of miles of network cables and machine wire over 30 years. Suspended ceilings are a piece of cake with just coiling up 30' of cable and throwing it like a frisbee. A large 1" nut on a string is good for throwing as well. Also works well in hollow walls. Drop it down and insert a coat hanger bent into a hook into the bottom hole to fish for the string. 5' drill bits work well in wood if you get the tool to control the arc of the bit. Fiberglass rods work well for fishing, but take too long vs just throwing a nut and string. We did have the little dart gun with fishing reel. It was ok, but the hard plastic dart tends to bounce off of things, ricochet, and then the pull line gets tangled up in other things in industrial ceilings.

Worst guy I ever worked with always wanted to start on the lowest floor and push the snakes up. We always wanted to start at the high point and let gravity be your buddy. Never could figure that guy out. We finally told him we'd do all the work if he'd just plan the projects. We got along great after that.

 

[k0ua]

let gravity be your buddy.

Best piece of advice yet. Don't fight it. It will just make life hard. Work smarter not harder.

 

[MossRoad]

Best piece of advice yet. Don't fight it. It will just make life hard. Work smarter not harder.

Another thing.... we'd always pull 4 wires to the desktop. So we always had 4 boxes of wire to do it in one pull. And 4 spare boxes because, well, if you don't have spares, you run out. Murphy's law. This guy would only keep one box being used and one full box in-house and try to get us to do 4 pulls from one box instead of 1 pull from 4 boxes. Quadrupled the labor! 200'+ runs were common. 5 runs and the 1000' box is empty. Many times the owner would walk by and say "Didn't I just see you up in the ceiling in this same spot yesterday?" I finally had enough, bypassed my supervisor, gave the owner a breakdown of the labor costs per run VS doing 4 wire pull runs, downtime driving to supply house every week Vs keeping wire in stock, and risk of injury to people and equipment each time we went into the ceilings. Got $50 and a coffee cup for that one! :laughing:

 

[k0ua]

Another thing.... we'd always pull 4 wires to the desktop. So we always had 4 boxes of wire to do it in one pull. And 4 spare boxes because, well, if you don't have spares, you run out. Murphy's law. This guy would only keep one box being used and one full box in-house and try to get us to do 4 pulls from one box instead of 1 pull from 4 boxes. Quadrupled the labor! 200'+ runs were common. 5 runs and the 1000' box is empty. Many times the owner would walk by and say "Didn't I just see you up in the ceiling in this same spot yesterday?" I finally had enough, bypassed my supervisor, gave the owner a breakdown of the labor costs per run VS doing 4 wire pull runs, downtime driving to supply house every week Vs keeping wire in stock, and risk of injury to people and equipment each time we went into the ceilings. Got $50 and a coffee cup for that one! :laughing:

Yep, sounds like you have pulled a little wire in your time. I have done a bit. Not lately though....

 

[MossRoad]

Yep, sounds like you have pulled a little wire in your time. I have done a bit. Not lately though....

Thick net, thin net, twisted pair of all categories, fiber... silver satin. 25 pair cables. 50 pair. Pretty much everything network or telecom related. Did most of our own terminations, too. On the machine side, I got to work with an electrician re-wiring the inking system on an 18 unit letterpress printing press. We'd take down a unit, strip it of all wire and controls, make up a wiring harness, punch knockouts in about 20 new boxes, install the boxes, new flex seal conduit, pull in the harness, silkscreen handmade control panels, install switches and relays, sensors, etc... make all connections and home-run harness to control cabinets. We used newfangled programmable controllers that we wrote the programs for. About 72 controllers for the entire press. It would take the two of us 2 weeks to do each unit. We stopped counting after 57 miles of wire in the harnesses. :confused2:

Many projects like that over the years. It was a great place to work. :thumbsup:

 

[Oaktree]

Well there's the beauty of living in a 100 year old house with balloon construction and little wall insulation. :laughing:

On the other end of the scale, my house is an 1830s-vintage plank house...the walls are 4x24 vertical planks notched & pegged into 12x12 sills & beams. Big fun pulling wire here!

At my old employer I ran hundreds of miles of network cables and machine wire over 30 years. Suspended ceilings are a piece of cake with just coiling up 30' of cable and throwing it like a frisbee. A large 1" nut on a string is good for throwing as well. Also works well in hollow walls. Drop it down and insert a coat hanger bent into a hook into the bottom hole to fish for the string. 5' drill bits work well in wood if you get the tool to control the arc of the bit. Fiberglass rods work well for fishing, but take too long vs just throwing a nut and string. We did have the little dart gun with fishing reel. It was ok, but the hard plastic dart tends to bounce off of things, ricochet, and then the pull line gets tangled up in other things in industrial ceilings.

I spend many years as a broadcast engineer. Mostly old small-town radio stations that had been in the same building 50+ years. Lots and lots of no longer used wiring between studios, etc., all bundled together with AC. If you were lucky, the AC was romex, more likely either lamp cord or 8451 that was terminated on at least one end on a punch block or barrier strip. Of course, nothing was labeled or if it was it was either cryptic or obsolete (ie-"John's office"...where John hadn't worked there in 25 years). Real fun getting new cabling thru those cable troughs!! ullinghair:

Worst guy I ever worked with always wanted to start on the lowest floor and push the snakes up. We always wanted to start at the high point and let gravity be your buddy.

I worked with one of those guys once. He thought the whole idea of the fiberglass rods was to push cabling up thru a conduit. Took forever to get him to realize it was a lot easier to go down, then hook cable bundle and pull.
Nice enough guy, but had no related experience...I think he was a friend of the boss.

 

[Industrial Toys]

It always makes me think how many unused conductors were strung never to have seen current.

Most stupid thing ever was that push for that integrated wire/fiber system. Can't think of the name now. Coax, fiber, Twisted Pair, and Cat 5 all in a bundle going to one place in each room for future proofing. Who wants all those to the (same) place in one room?

Drop ceilings are great except when they have thirty year old fiber glass batts atop them for insulation and sound proofing. Reminds, me, I should have been working at that exact job this week!

 

[Industrial Toys]

These Beemers are going to need new hood emblems too.

Crumpled Brand new BMWs DESTROYED on cargo ship, NOT Secured Promptly - YouTube

FINE GERMAN AUTOMOBILES

Look a little like my Moms Impala I inspected yesterday after she sideswiped a concrete column in her parking garage!

 

[tallyho8]

Why do my projects take so long? Let me count the ways.... I went to cut up a large tree branch that fell before I had to go to an important appointment. Having done this many times before I knew it would only take me 20 minutes and I had an hour to spare. I was sure it would go fast because I had a new chain for my saw and had just mixed up a gallon of 2 cycle gas. I went to get the saw out of the garage and it wasn't where I usually keep it. Where did I leave it? I went and searched the barn, then the tool shed, then the tractor shed, my son's garage, the attic storage space, etc.

After 30 minutes of searching I returned to the house griping about it to my wife. She says "Just borrow the neighbor's chain saw. I saw him using it just yesterday". What? my neighbor doesn't have a chain saw. He usually borrows mine. OH!

Yesterday I went to put up a board fence on a piece of property I own across town. I had already brought all the boards over there and had set the posts and just needed to nail on the boards. No problem. I had a generator, an air compressor, a pneumatic nailer, lots of nails, gas, oil, everything. A 2 hour job and I had 8 hours to do it. Of course I had to use my tractor to load the generator into the pickup truck and loading the compressor, attachments and tools took about 45 minutes.

My wife says " be sure to get back in time because I have to use the truck to pick up the new furniture at 4:00". No problem, I'll be finished and back and have the truck unloaded by noon. Long story short, after nailing on 150 of the 250 pickets, the nailer breaks. Have to order part out of town, takes 3 days to get it. Have to run to nearest Home Depot, but a few boxes of nails, go back and use my regular hammer to nail up the final 100 boards. One sore arm, 2 smashed fingers, and 6 hours later I finish up rush home and unload truck just in time for my wife to leave with it. Grrrr…..