Cool tool

Couldn't you trace the wires with a battery and test light and keep the $70?
 
flyingbrit said:
Couldn't you trace the wires with a battery and test light and keep the $70?
Click to expand...

With this tester, you can follow a wire without stripping off the insulation. We used them regularly when I was installing telecom circuits.
 
They are handy. And thy've come down since I last looked at one. About 1995...

May add that to my Christmas list...
 
RV's commonly used these wires for AC thermostat control.
 
I can see where that could be handy. How does work if a wire splits off by some method? Does it identify all wires closed or connected to that circuit?
 
flyingbrit said:
Couldn't you trace the wires with a battery and test light and keep the $70?
Click to expand...
My ignition switch has 1 wire that disappears into a conduit 2" thick. hard to sort them out.
 
“Couldn't you trace the wires with a battery and test light and keep the $70?”

Sorry, I screwed up the quote and had to edit it...

It’s not always that easy. I worked as an A&P for the airlines for years. We had to deal with huge bundles. You don’t want to go throwing battery power into a large bundle generally. More common method was to identify with ohm meter.
The nice thing about Tom’s tool is apparently you don’t have to disrupt the wire. I’m interested in it. Definitely want to read up to see how it really works.
 
Last edited:
Jdm said:
“Couldn't you trace the wires with a battery and test light and keep the $70?”

Sorry, I screwed up the quote and had to edit it...

It’s not always that easy. I worked as an A&P for the airlines for years. We had to deal with huge bundles. You don’t want to go throwing battery power into a large bundle generally. More common method was to identify with ohm meter.
The nice thing about Tom’s tool is apparently you don’t have to disrupt the wire. I’m interested in it. Definitely want to read up to see how it really works.
Click to expand...
sorry about the ads,

the one I bought.
 
Anyone here ever work on Piller 75 kVA 400 Hz Silentblock motor generator frequency converters and paralleling cabinets that tied several of them together? They were used on IBM mainframes, the largest being the monster 3090 600J.

I spent considerable time troubleshooting the paralleling cabinet connections to the MGs. They were sensitive to slew rate settings, which affected the ability to parallel multiple MG units, and with all the wiring being one color it was a challenge. There were about 25 conductors between the parallel cabinet and each MG. Having schematics obviously helped, but translating the German was a pain. Without a tone generator it became moreso.

This is a typical setup, the paralleling cabinet and three MGs are in the foreground, and that's an IBM 3090 600 behind them.

piller-history-piller-silent-block.jpeg
 
Why ever would mainframe computers run on 400Hz power?
 
400Hz was standard power in a lot of military applications during and after the second world war. I had a couple of little (cement block sized) motor generators for aircraft use that my dad picked up somewhere that output 400Hz. One advantage was it was easier to get smooth DC power out of them because the peaks between rectified pulses of DC were so much closer together smaller filter capacitors could be used. I'm not sure what other advantages there were other than an abundance of already specified components and circuits to draw on.

Switching power supplies (which are still the standard in computers as far as I know) actually generate AC at 15KHz and above internally to then rectify and filter. Same principle, just much faster and contained within the supply.
 
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