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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 5:19 pm   #81
Craig Sawyers
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Default Re: Bodges

Around 15 years ago I restored Bletchley's Lorenz SZ42 cipher maching. The WWII German mains colour codes were interesting, and non-intuitive.

Live: Black
Neutral: Grey
Earth: Red

Craig
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 5:23 pm   #82
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You need to decipher the original German codes.....
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 5:24 pm   #83
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Default Re: Bodges

I've a German produced Cartavox recorder in the collection that has that very same mains colour coding. A trap for the unwary!


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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 5:51 pm   #84
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heres a classic example found fitted to a bit of test gear. Fuse wire substitution!


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I've seen a 13A fuse where someone has drilled a small hole in each of the end-caps and put a piece of 1mm wire stripped from T&E through. They went to the time and effort to neatly solder the wire to the end-caps too, all which undoubtedly cost more of their time than the cost of a new, proper fuse.
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 6:36 pm   #85
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Maybe no fuse available? Sort of thing one does if in desperation. Though, exceedingly naughty to leave afterwards. (And I'd have used thinner wire anyway, to have given a modicum of protection in the meantime).
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 6:46 pm   #86
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Very few outside service engineers in this thread then.....

Lawrence.
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 7:31 pm   #87
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Default Re: Bodges

One or two strands of 0.2mm dia copper wire from lighting flex or similar is a reasonable get out of trouble bodge when soldered through a plug fuse. It has a fusing current of around 7A per strand.
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 7:59 pm   #88
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Default Re: Bodges

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Quote:
Originally Posted by terry123 View Post
heres a classic example found fitted to a bit of test gear. Fuse wire substitution!


Terry
I've seen a 13A fuse where someone has drilled a small hole in each of the end-caps and put a piece of 1mm wire stripped from T&E through. They went to the time and effort to neatly solder the wire to the end-caps too, all which undoubtedly cost more of their time than the cost of a new, proper fuse.
Maybe they wanted to run a welder and didn't have a cut-off bit of 1/4" pot shaft at the time....
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 8:07 pm   #89
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A danger with external fuse wire, even if of an appropriate rating, is that it provides no arc-quenching functionality. I recall when the insulation of the flex of mum's iron failed, and the fuse in the plug had been an unbranded one that had been bought at a street market many years before. The short circuit current must have vapourised the fuse wire inside the ceramic fuse body. The resulting explosive arc had blasted holes in both the flimsy end caps, evidently filling the inside of the plug with copper vapour and allowing an arc to become established across the fuse carrier in series with the arc in the flex. The arc current was low enough not to blow the 30A ring main fuse, and if she hadn't been present and had time to pull out the plug from its unswitched wall socket before it got too hot, a fire could well have been started. This was in the days before circuit breakers were prevalent, so possibly such a hazardous situation would not arise in a modern installation.
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 8:29 pm   #90
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Default Re: Bodges

Quote:
Originally Posted by Craig Sawyers View Post
Around 15 years ago I restored Bletchley's Lorenz SZ42 cipher maching. The WWII German mains colour codes were interesting, and non-intuitive.

Live: Black
Neutral: Grey
Earth: Red
Cunning Nazi ploy to kill anyone trying to use it should it fall into British hands!

David
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 9:08 pm   #91
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I had red as ground in my home built 1962 -isj here in Stavanger/Sola - Norway. It was quite disturbing, back in the early 80's, in school, beeing learned about the yellow/green as earth, finding red -all over the place in housings and other buildings. After using green/yellow as ground it did'nt help introducing red/yellow as signal ground, interconnected to the green/yellow power ground ;-)
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 9:09 pm   #92
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Default Re: Bodges

But now, with the harmonised colour scheme, black does represent live - but then, so does grey, along with brown for the three phases.
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 9:12 pm   #93
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Default Re: Bodges

Hello David,

indeed a stunning new explanation
But well, I am pretty sure this colour code had already been common before 1930.
To make things worse, if you have to deal with four or five wire cable intended for three phase ac, a blue wire would add to the confusion. I live in a house where old and new systems meet in the basement and I had to explain to my youngest son (now a certified electrician) what the background is. In a modern industrial work environment young guys never have to deal with such problems.

Regards, Joe
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 9:20 pm   #94
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Default Re: Bodges

My ex-RAF AR88 receiver came in a Military shipping-crate with - and still has - a mains-cable that was black/red/yellow.

Never trust anything 'unusual' to be wired with consistent colour-codes.
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 9:31 pm   #95
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Red-yellow-black is as familiar to me as Red-green-black- possibly because of the circles i have moved in!

Dave
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 9:42 pm   #96
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Default Re: Bodges

Quote:
Originally Posted by Craig Sawyers View Post
Around 15 years ago I restored Bletchley's Lorenz SZ42 cipher maching. The WWII German mains colour codes were interesting, and non-intuitive.

Live: Black
Neutral: Grey
Earth: Red

Craig
What's wrong with red earth?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rote_Erde_(TV_series)
Curiously I can't remember seeing an old German house with a proper earth. Maybe appliances had an earth wire but in the house wiring it was common to have only live and neutral connected and the earth was provided by shorting earth and neutral in the sockets. Even in the 1960s this was a common way of doing it. It was also common to have special radio mains sockets. Unlike Schuko sockets, these were polarized and the live side had a length of antenna cable attached to it. Inside a radio the antenna input was connected to mains live via a capacitor. If the capacitor failed that messed the radio up completely. The antenna cable up in the attic was also potentially lethal as it was connected directly to mains live. Don't ask me how I know this.
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 10:30 pm   #97
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Curiously I can't remember seeing an old German house with a proper earth. Maybe appliances had an earth wire but in the house wiring it was common to have only live and neutral connected and the earth was provided by shorting earth and neutral in the sockets.
That's also found in older houses here in Poland. A 2-wire system in which earth and neutral are one and the same all the way to the socket.

I very nearly came to grief because of this, and another bodge. We lived in a house with 2-wire wiring, and this included the washing machine in the cellar, next to a sink with all its earthed plumbing (sort of - equipotential bonding seems to be a purely UK phenomenon). One day the washing machine stopped working. Investigating, I found that the feed to its socket came via a junction box in which aluminium and copper wires were twisted together and insulated with fabric tape! Luckily it was the live side that corroded away and melted first. If it had been the neutral (and thus earth) , which was in a similarly poor state, the whole casing of the washing machine would have ended up live at 230V.

I remade the connections more securely and we had a stern word with the landlady about the state of the wiring. We didn't stay much longer so that horror may still be there.

Chris
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Old 2nd Sep 2020, 11:11 pm   #98
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Default Re: Bodges

A TNC system is banned here in the UK for public supplies, apart from the DNO distribution network on the supply side, where it then becomes a TNC-S system on the consumer side after the main intake, lots of Eastern European states (former Soviet Warsaw pact countries especially) will still have legacy systems though where this state on the consumer side of things still applies.
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Old 3rd Sep 2020, 12:26 am   #99
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Apologies if already mentioned: Getting a belt off the aerial plug on a CRT TV, only to find that the RF transformer-isolated socket which had originally been fitted had at some point been replaced with a simple socket, outer connected directly to chassis at half-mains or worse.
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Old 3rd Sep 2020, 12:50 am   #100
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The German wiring colours were the main reason the EU finished up with the rather counterintuitive brown-blue-yellow/green standard for domestic wiring. Most engineers at the time thought that the British red-black-green standard was more intuitively obvious (including plenty in Germany), but applying it in countries that had previously followed the German standard would have been absolutely lethal.
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