Warning: I was stripping cable wrong for 3 years and never knew

I was out on a job last Tuesday pulling coax through a drop ceiling in an office park near St. Louis. The jacket kept fraying and splitting unevenly, so I tried the technique where you score it lightly with your snips first instead of yanking it. Turns out my old method was crushing the dielectric layer and causing signal loss. Has anyone else had a moment where a simple tool swap fixed a problem you didn't even know you had?

2 comments

2 Comments

phoenix_campbell888d ago

Man I felt this one. I had been using the same cheap crimpers for years and couldn't figure out why half my terminations kept failing. Finally borrowed a buddy's ratcheting tool and it was night and day. The old ones were crushing the connector just enough to cause intermittent shorts. Still kicks me when I think about all those service calls I could have avoided.

stone.jesse8d ago

Oh man that's a good one. I had a similar thing happen but with my multimeter probes. I was using the cheap ones that came with the meter for years and got used to getting flaky readings on continuity checks. Then I bought a set of silicone leads with sharper tips and suddenly everything made sense. The old probes were oxidizing at the connection point inside the meter and nobody told me you're supposed to clean them or replace them every so often. I spent like two years thinking my Fluke was going bad when it was just the stupid probes.

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