Had a chat with an old timer that made me rethink my whole approach

I was swapping stories with a guy who's been doing cable installs since the 80s, and he told me he never uses a toner anymore. He said he can trace lines just by feeling the cable jacket and listening to the hum in a wall. At first I thought he was full of it, but then he showed me on a job we were working in Akron last week. He found a bad splice in about 30 seconds by hand, which would've taken me 10 minutes with my gear. Now I'm wondering if I lean too hard on my tools and not enough on basic know-how. Has anyone else had an old-school installer drop some weird trick that actually worked?

2 comments

2 Comments

evan_harris141d ago

Man oh man that guy sounds like the kind of installer who could probably find a needle in a haystack blindfolded while I can barely find my keys on the counter without my glasses. I totally get what you mean about leaning on tools too much though. Half the time I bust out my fancy signal tracer just to end up chasing ghosts in the wall because I forgot to check if the battery was dead first. It's humbling when some old pro walks in and solves the whole job by licking his finger and holding it up to the drywall like he's testing the wind. Makes me wonder if I should start eating more bananas for the natural voltage sensing powers or something.

sams251d ago

I was just reading an article online about how older electricians basically had to build their own troubleshooting skills from scratch because the fancy tools either didn't exist or cost way too much, @evan_harris14. It said a lot of them developed a sixth sense for finding breaks in circuits just by touch and sound. Makes you wonder if all this tech is actually making us worse at the fundamentals. Maybe we should all take a month and go back to using just a basic multimeter and a flashlight. Have you ever tried going a whole day without signal tracers or tone generators to see if you can still hack it?