best...and worst installs

[jeffmoss26]

ok, i have always been interested in this,
what the best and worst install that you guys have done?
i am only 15 so i have worked on just a few jobs, not enough to really rank them.
jeff jeff moss
jeffmoss26@adelphia.net

 

[dodger6]

I wont list these as my personal installs, I was called in to attempt to "fix" bad installs.

Worst: (tied)
1) Oil tanker 1994 Long Beach Harbor. Coaxial cable good old BnC connectors. Some guy used those cheap hand twist on endings for all the cables, junction points included. We were under orders not to take the network offline. They would pay an extra $55/hr if we could do it their way. Well you've got roughly 18 seconds before a Novell 3.11 network cannot recover from loss of a connection. My fastest time strip,slide,crimp and connect 8.3 seconds. (yeah we had a stop watch). Nasty job and had to throw my dockers and shirt away when we were done I had grease head to toe.

2) My current job. Law office 2002. The original wiring was cat3. Telephone and data are spliced togeather with no labeling. Somewhere in the air conditioning ducts (yes INSIDE THEM) there is a splice where the cat3 is hand tied and electrical taped into cat5 wiring. Nasty nasty business.

 

[vaoldschl]

Okay, so, this is appropriate because I was just saying this morning that the organization I work for must have hired monkeys to wire this building prior to my coming on board.

25 pair cable comes off my main frame and travels two feet to a sodder connection cleverly hidden behind the frame. It then travels 10 feet to a 66 block before heading from one wing of the building to the other. Between that initial 66 and the 'final' (meaning I haven't found it extended anywhere else yet) destination I have four, yes, four, 66 blocks splicing the cable and extending it. At each of these 66 blocks someone has jumped at least one phone to a nearby location. So, same pair count appears in four different closets. If that's not bad enough it's labelled different in each.

My favorite, however; running off of old Executone 25-pair intercom wire to the IDF I have splice points placed randomly throughout my ceilings. Some using 66 blocks and some using crimp on ends that give you 8 jacks out of the 25 pair using 6 wire connections, I think these herald from old Merlin systems, but the wonderful part about that is there is no indication at the jack that this is the case so if you try to tone out a pair to the actual closet there is a good chance you won't find it and if it is labelled in the closet then it's labelled wrong.

On top of that my MDF has 110 blocks coming off the system and 66 blocks distributing the house pair so every time I add a phone I have to punch the port, change blades and punch the house pair.

My previous installation was perfect. MDF so clean you could eat off the floor. Two buildings, each 9 stories. IDF stacked upon IDF. In one building there was an IDF on each side of the elevator, in the other a larger IDF for each floor. Every jack was labelled with the floor number and the jack number and corresponded to a number in the closet. The only thing the installation lacked when I got there was a database showing the relationship from port to phone to jack to cable pair and I created that for them before I moved on.