Can I FIX a BT MOLE ? - A Great Piece Of TELECOM TEST KIT

[@GreenJimll]

Some of us are old enough to remember "Post Office Telephones" vans before BT existed! I used to work for our University networks team and we used TDR (Time Domain Relfectometry) gear to do similar fault finding. We had both copper TDR and optical TDR to allow similar faults to be spotted in fibre links (which seemed to break and be more attractive to vermin than the old multi-pair telecom cables ever were). The Cisco switch had a handy TDR feature too, so you could run the TDR test from your desk before you trudged to the other side of campus. 🙂

[@koumi1]

That scratch noise from your fibre brush makes me shiver. Reminds me of a school chalk board

[@StezStixFix]

Holy Mole-y! That is a great bit of kit! Really interesting to see the insides. 👍

[@Mymatevince]

😂 Cheers Steve

[@jacobwei3428]

Love your videos. Keeps me motivated to fix things. Started with par controller and will do more in the future

[@Mymatevince]

Great to hear! Big thanks for the first ever donation on my channel for Super Chat. A very nice surprise 👍👍👍👍

[@MikeB_UK]

As one of your techo nerd viewers, I found this one really interesting. Your fixes are always great, but learning about this bit of BT kit and how it was used was really entertaining. Maybe you could do more about your old BT tools or any other info from your time there? Love all your stuff. Keep up the great work.

[@Elmantukas]

What a great video! Not long ago i was living in a place where one day the internet just went offline, BT guy came out plugged in one of these devices, just very modern, diagnosed a break in the line, saw the distance, went outside and was like "umm ok yes yes, its that pole" 😃 and it sure was, turned out someone disconnected our line and plugged theirs in.

[@xerxes4863]

In my previous job, we had a "magic cable tester" for computer related cables. Worked fine for digital stuff where you had lots of leads per cable. It had support for various kinds of contacts so it was easy to use for almost any kind of cable. The gadget you fixed reminds me a lot about that one. Very nice Vince, thank you

[@MrDbone75]

A very good Monday afternoon to you all from Wellington Somerset

[@pikeplace187]

Thank you for another great video. I actually put your playlists on to help me fall asleep at night.

[@MalcolmCrabbe]

As an Ex BT installer form the late 80's we never had something that fancy... just a simple oscillator, with headphones and a probe... the tone would get louder the closest you got to the pair, and stop when shorted....Guaranteed you would use one at least once on every provide as the routing and records would often be incorrect unless the line was to a new estate ! - Fascinating video Vince, enjoyed it immensely

[@joemason1992]

Actually found this really interesting, i work for a CP in Yorkshire. As part of my old job i was on the phone to BT / Openreach engineers almost daily so pretty interesting to see some of the old kit!

[@markvandesande8855]

It's great using a mole at work and a hawk for cable testing so much easier to find a fault on subsea cables a total life saver.

[@jhoutdoors3906]

Hi Vince I worked for Openreach for a while and the BT Hawk had been replaced by the JDSU which had TDR/Bridge Test/Multimeter all built in along with options for performing a 'PQT' pair quality test which would measure insulation resistance / wideband noise and AC balance etc and it could also emulate an ADSL/VDSL modem. I left Openreach to work for BT now I maintain the switch and transmission networks and also maintain Vodafone and 02 mobile sites a great job.

[@01buzzy]

Loving here telco terms from another country lol. I’m a fiber splicer. I’ve enjoyed your vids for yrs.

[@johnhousego9218]

Really interesting never seen one before. Very well built I bet that was quite expensive in its day. Thanks for sharing Vince.

[@hunter00047]

I worked for BT and we could access the same test via a css terminal in any exchange or office this one work's for miles it even could put on a test oscillator for cable tracking on dropwires. It was a great system. 👍

[@mark-andrews]

Your previous vocation must be an advantage, you know what this device is supposed to do. I know you frequently work blind on most of your repairs, so much respect for that. I have watched lots of your videos, overall another great addition to your library of uploads.

[@three-phase562]

Thanks for the video, great bit of fault finding. I think Bicotest made quite a bit of specialised test equipment for BT over the years. It looks like a bespoke time-domain reflectometer calibrated specifically for telephone cable. I have used similar instruments for tracing faults on power cables, but we would have a velocity factor to set depending on the type of cable we were testing. I believe the velocity factor is the time characteristic of 1 metre of cable for the reflected pulse. A CAT5 cable with a different size copper / twist ratio would have a different velocity factor to make the measurement accurate.

[@brendonelton]

Very cool, thoroughly understood that, very interesting as to why it wouldn't be accurate using CAT5 etc as well! Thumbs up from me!

[@vinmakesthings]

What a fascinating piece of kit, VInce. Thank you also for the insightful information you provided about telecom engineering. Great video!

[@kasamialt]

I don't even work in telecom or networking or anything that involves long runs of wire, but now I want one of these. It's a really neat bit of kit.

[@kiphakes]

What a lovely video Vince! A fix and a lot of interesting information - always cool to hear about your old job!

[@Mymatevince]

Cheers Kip👍

[@flibble666]

Awesome video and amazing effort on that back light . I been follow this channel some time now and the progress on your knowledge and skills has come so far keep up the amazing work.

[@tehklevster]

Nice one Vince, brings back memories. I remember being introduced to TDR kit back in the 90's, what a revelation they were when it came to fault finding. I did single mode fibre (and splicing) as well so we had OTDR testers as well.

[@Andre1980stavanger]

Used to work as a Telecom Engineer myself for Telenor in Norway. We didn't normally use this kind of equipment (We had them, pulse reflectometers), but we had a phone number we called up, or sent an SMS to, and entered the customers phone number. the equipment in the phone exchange would then disconnect the line from the exchange, measure the line, and send an SMS back to me with all the values. It would show ac and dc voltage to ground, and between the 2 wires, the restistance to ground and between the wires, and also the capacitance to ground and between the wires. These values gave a pretty good overview of the line, and we could easily see if we had a connection all the way to the customer, due to most sockets having a 380k resistance mounted. There was also regularly taken reference measurements at night so on a fault report, you could also see how the line was performing before the customer complained. Edit: We also had instruments simliar to this, but it was more easy to use the sms-service.

[@johnwright8814]

I remember the little yellow Morris vans when I was a TT(A) in 1972...I recently got fibre broadband and watched the installation. How things have changed in 50 years.

[@TrimeshSZ]

I used to have a much older version of this, also made by BICC - it basically did the same thing, but it used a CRT for the display rather than an LCD. It also used a tunnel diode in the pulse generator -which was the part that had failed.

[@Falco45able]

I had the one before this model, as you say the crt one , and I did have this one later on , 😉👍

[@georgevlastos9668]

I am working in a big ISP as field technician. From 2008 we used to work with Argus 145plus and last year the company replaced it with the Viavi. I love the TDR. Make the work a lot simpler to pinpoint the fault on the line.

[@mce_AU]

We used to use a P.E.T (Pulse Echo Tester) or T.D.R. (Time Domain Reflectometer) when finding transmission line faults on the Railway I worked for. Cheers.

[@BakedPrawns]

I started with a hawk Vince. I still have it working perfectly. I then had a JDSU (Infineon sim), then a JDSU (Broadcom sim) and now a viavi one expert. They have had to get more and more advanced to be able to detect digital services on pairs without voltage as VOIP is now on FTTC type lines called SOGEA. They have no voltage or dial tone, like FTTP the dial tone is added from the router. They also have to have the ability to sync with all the different types of copper services like gfast

[@ziksfix]

It always amazes me when I see someone working in one of those green boxes, just rats nests of cables, how anyone can do anything in them is beyond me. This is great though, a clever and simple concept that must've really sped up fault finding!

[@Mymatevince]

Really is/was very useful Marc 👍👍👍

[@SoulJuce]

The cabinets are a piece of work especially the ones we call a midland shelf which are just riddled with potential faults 🤣 i no longer work in them I’ve moved onto fibre but it was enjoyable to have that challenge everyday

[@eddiejones.redvees]

The secret to work in cabinets is a oscillator which your attach to line you are working on and it sends a tone down the pair of wires you are looking for also you can get a tone from the telephone exchange if you ring the number you are working on

[@VLC8792]

I used to work in a different industry on equipment with a lot of same colour wires. Customers would ask how “I knew what I was doing”. My relay “who said I know what I was doing”

[@guitchess]

Amazing the info that is so easy to get now. I, a 50year old carpenter, knew what this was and could build one for $20 in parts. Yet, that piece of equipment probably cost $1000 thirty years ago. Thanks MMV for the always great vid.

[@johnsellers4994]

the new testers for fibre line are very expensive the fluke ones we use at work are about $2500

[@franganghi]

As a it/tlc specialist i understand the value of this device. Even today, in small towns the internet is brought to the user used old twisted pairs so it can still be useful to have one at home but i can make the exact same measure from the cab by the web gui of the app used by my company.

[@williamharris8367]

2:20 -- this happened to me once. I lived in a very large apartment building and one day my phone ceased to work (no dial tone). The technician allowed me to accompany him into the service room. There was this huge mass of wires, and one was very obviously disconnected and hanging loose. Apparently someone else was in there earlier in the day, and had knocked something loose. The whole process took maybe 15 minutes.

[@Ragnar8504]

A few weeks ago my parents had a telecomms engineer visit their smalltown holiday home because one of the neighbour's phones didn't work. The tech crawled up into the loft (the cable crosses the street, into my parents' loft and then from house to house along the street) and found the pair had been disconnected in the splice box. The kicker? It had been like this for over a year but the elderly neighbours had never noticed! I suspect the fault happened when a tractor with an overloaded trailer took out the line crossing the street, uprooted the pole next to our house and pulled various pairs out of the terminals in our loft.

[@andrasszabo7386]

Hello Vince, When dealing with displays like that, watch out for ESD's on those IC's on the back of the display board. I had trouble with a very old laptop display using those decoder chips and I have touched them accidently and one of them went into heaven. So I recommend an ESD strap for that delicate equipment.

[@waynestyles7916]

Vince when I was a young man I used to make these wires. Fine wire drawing. Some were thinner than a hair.

[@MrJDNJ]

I'm glad you mentioned the cat 5 wire, I was wondering if it could be calibrated for something like coax cable. We just had a cable company re-install a new wire because an existing wire wasn't connected anymore (all underground and through multiple walls, crawlspaces, etc,) and they didn't seem to have any information on why it failed. Something like this could have been useful!

[@fulf]

That type of ribbon cable too the screen i like to use a regular iron insted of a soldering iron becouse you can put some pressure.

[@xboxlegend6789]

Wow blast from the past there used these in my trainee days 20 years on they just got smaller

[@Mercgribern]

I very much do enjoy your videos you might have explored this as an option previously, the series white LED lighting similar to what you found is often sold in spools with elastic backing. It may not be small enough for purpose here, but it can be clipped to measure, and wiring wise is easy to tie into. Great video!

[@Fifury161]

13:18 - no, that was for an RS232 9 pin connector - for use with X600 TRACEability Software System - "ensures waveforms can be analysed, stored and reloaded to the TDR for on-site, dynamic comparison of the waveforms" (same case was used for the more advanced models).

[@carlb1056]

Nice use of the test leads for a BC18 👍👍 I've got a hawk, 9083, JDSU and a exfo.. The hawk is by far the best of the testers I have.

[@ericrichardson3332]

Use a resistor to lower the voltage to the leds to make then dimmer if needed

[@vapourtrails77]

Brings back a few memories, the Hawk was useless nothing better than a mole and a 9083 robin :D

[@markshellard5894]

Handy little gadget saving you time tracking a fault

[@TheSkaldenmettrunk]

What an iintersting item! A part of telecom history! I bet they where used here in switzerland too. Lovely! Oh and a good fix btw.

[@andrewmolloy5095]

Great video Vince, I have to say the last bit was mumbo jumbo to me, but, I'm not a telephone engineer... I'm sure your BT colleagues knew exactly what you were talking about.

[@jasonrebello9898]

Nice fix vincè!!!!

[@leedale5393]

Found one in some gear I had given and now I know what it does,and it even works/lights up.

[@BuyitFixit]

​Looks a cool bit of kit, not seen one of those before. I've just been working on something a slightly bit bigger.. diagnosing some electrical issues on a Fendt tractor.

[@Mymatevince]

Thanks, I've just subscribed. Hopefully I can make time and check out your videos over the next month👍👍👍

[@BuyitFixit]

@@Mymatevince Thank you sooo much vince. I've had a youtube channel for about 14 years and didn't really do a lot of videos as I'm a bit camera shy! I uploaded a video about 3 years ago when I was repairing a washing machine PCB, and it is my most popular video. My repair "career" started back in the late 80's when I was working in amusement arcades repairing video games / fruit machines etc and I used to repair a lot of items from friends / relatives. I have been following your channel for quite some time. I have some Milwaukee tools and noticed you repaired a Milwaukee Radio. That's what actually inspired me to start doing repair videos! I didn't have a radio and thought it would be a good addition to my tools so I bought a broken one and repaired it. It kind of progressed from there. Any tips / advice would be great!👍👍👍👍

[@daz41262010]

nice repair Vince :)

[@KazsprG]

Geez,i remember that device from SBC days and MA Bell

[@markwhitfield5412]

there is a tool for glued ribbon cables, it's an attachment that fits on your soldering iron, like a 2" wide thin block with a silicone pad, to re-melt the conductive glue, without melting the plastic of the ribbon cable.

[@jamesearl5071]

wow! this teck should be in our DIY shops or behind the counter maybe ...

[@Jeff121456]

Back in the dark ages (late 70s) we had a Hewlett-Packard TDR (time domain reflectometer) that was the size of a small suitcase and weighing about 35 pounds. But it was a marvel at finding bad connections in aircraft wiring. Being able to pinpoint the right panel to remove to repair the connector saved a lot of time and headaches.

[@rrhprosser]

It's a TDR (Time Domain reflectometer). Works as a mini radar set by sending a (very fast) step voltage down the wires and times the reflection from impedance changes such as shorts & opens. As such it's more dependent on the dielectric of the pair than the resistance of the wire.

[@revelationnow]

I remember Communications Engineering 101 involved building one of these from signal generators and oscilloscopes and figuring out the break distance using pen and paper against the speed of electricity in copper and the time disparity/amplitude of the competing signals on the CRO (amplification indicating an open and weaker reflections indicating a short I think). This thing looks a lot more convenient.

[@TechGorilla1987]

@13:21 - I'd sooner guess that it may be a DB9 Serial port opening.

[@darkkahnthedarkone2268]

Hi there Vince! Thanks for all the videos, I've learned so much from you. In one of your vidoes you showed two books about electeronics, white cover with red and blue markings. What was their names, I want to know a little bit more about these components. Thanks, and keep up the good work!

[@Mymatevince]

Hi, let me grab them and find out... 3 books in total by Charles Platt, Volume 1,2 and 3. All called 'Encyclopedia of Electronic Components' ......Volume 1 is Power Sources & Conversion....Volume 2 is Signal Processing.....and Volume 3 is Sensors 👍👍👍

[@mancbiker17]

Oh man when I was installing car hifi I always wished I had one of these for finding breaks in speaker wiring. But too expensive for the amount of times I would have used it.

[@RGD-Audio-Repairs]

Yep, On a disconnect line.. It calculates the resistance as it travels down the line in slow pulses... it can calculate how far away the break is, By the timing it takes for the pulses to lose a connection, or no resistance... because the line is broken.... Same with short circuit too... Short circuit, as they say, Electricity takes the path of least resistance... So on a short circuit, its calculation of pulses, vs resistance, Would be incorrect readings, As the short circuit will allow the pulses to travel down that short, instead of as normal.. Therefor, Less resistance, which upsets the timings of the pulses etc... (My father was a telecom engineer for many years, I have seen these devices in operation many times, Fantastic pieces of kit)

[@pigpenpete]

I used to calibrate something nearly identical to this, the bicotest T625 and T631. I must've gone through thousands of them. Used to call them speak and spells, down to the similarity in case design. Bloody maintenance menace they were swapping out the soldered in 2032 battery every few years.

[@rfr653]

very interesting equipment. good job mate.

[@Adrian_Finn]

You know I have always wondered how the engineers go about determining this type of stuff, super piece of kit.

[@leonardodavidenriquezsilva7169]

the vga that ya said i think is more likely to be a serial port and rs232 for debug or thing like that

[@hairy248]

love your vids. i have loads of bt tools years ago there was a second hand market in leytonstone i was an apprentice electrician and bought loads of tools very cheeply from there my fav tool is a wolf drill that will not burn out lol £5 all them years ago date on all tools is 1992

[@ray73864]

Looks like there is at least 1 YT video of the 301C tester in action, it was uploaded a week ago.

[@DerekEmerson]

The individual pairs in Cat5 are twisted at different rates as well to reduce cross talk

[@watchmedraw4340]

I remember years ago when they were introducing fiberoptics and they were teaching people how to use the diagnosing machines. Sort of used a ping software to diagnose how far up a line the break or problem was.

[@robertbartram5632]

brought back memories using this brick

[@ChrisHopkinsBass]

This takes me back to my days of working for an ISP as a broadband techie and having to arrange for a BT Engineer to come out to look at the master socket…I lost count of the number of times that the cause of the problem was due to someone bodging the master socket or people outright lying to us over the phone as to how they had their connection (using a usb adsl modem) set up

[@jonathanlau1221]

This would have been a piece of equipment I would have given my left arm for when I was working for an ADSL ISP over a decade ago. Our company only armed us with a laptop & tone generator. I had to connect up the tone generator to the phone socket in the customers' house, then follow the tone signal from socket to telecomms cabinet, from the multiplexers to the phone exchange. All to figure out where the fault in the cables was. It could be as far as 9 or 10 miles from the customer, where the fault in the underground cable was. Just using the tone sensor to pick up the tone generator the entire way. Proper nightmare.

[@TheDefpom]

It won’t be based on resistance, but will be more like as used on a vector network analyser, RF reflections and wavelength.

[@Mymatevince]

Thanks Scott, yes I got that well wrong!!! 😂👍

[@miguelpinto84]

Its a TDR... very usefull on copper lines.

[@travellingslim]

This must have been a fun one! I was hoping for a mashup intro something like: "Hi, my name's Mr. Vince from My Mate Telephone!" =-)

[@megatronskneecap]

I'm not going to say where or how, but I'm pretty familiar with Dalamare Road up in Cheshnut! Great bit of history for Waltham Cross! Thanks, Vince :D

[@christopherdecorte1599]

For cat5 each twisted pair is done with twists per inch to reduce crosstalk.

[@SionynJones]

It's measures reflected waveforms through impedance.

[@karenharvey7197]

Over my head but still enjoyed it.

[@dodgydruid]

So in a way its the evolution of the ol' Everard bridge megger? With the old ones there were a couple ways to use it, one would be to strategically place the insulation testing clamp at various places and test and record, the other was to have the insulation clamp connected at a certain distance and from the measurement of a short and some maths you could measure out a certain distance along the cable and come out pretty much where the short was.

[@Doddster1983]

39:51 surely if cat5e cat6/7 etc are to some standard then surely you could equate that difference between the twists in cw1308 and cat6 and apply accordingly?

[@RoStepMusic]

This video made my day better, thank you 🙂

[@johnboi8346]

Nice bit of kit looks in nice condition!

[@nickolaswilcox425]

another name ive heard for this kind of equipment is tdr, time domain reflectometer, like you said, it tells you where all the joints are and where any shorts or opens are, it tells joints as blips since the resistance of the line changes a bit whenever the composition of the cable is altered such as with solder or cable crimps edit: side note, i hate zebra strips, they never work correctly after the factory connection starts failing and glued ribbon cables are even worse, basically impossible to get a reliable repair and they always fail eventually no matter how well it was connected originally

[@HavingFunRepairs]

Awesome video and excellent demonstration of basically a time-domain reflectometer (TDR). I loved the demo! Have you ever used any transmission test set devices like an Ameritec AM-48 or Navtel HATS-2 during your BT days? I assume the UK would have similar devices.

[@Mymatevince]

Thanks Shawn, yes a TDR (I forgot that term). No, never seen them before. Unfortunately we only had access to limited test equipment, only what we needed to do the job. Cheers for commenting 👍

[@HavingFunRepairs]

@@Mymatevince to be fair, I forgot it until I watched your video. It's been a few years since I last used one myself.

[@Mymatevince]

@@HavingFunRepairs 👍👍👍

[@HavingFunRepairs]

@@Mymatevince a "Fox and Hound" or "inductive amplifier and tone generator" are fairly common tools of the trade as well. I've used them outside of Telco troubleshooting to help with tracing paths on a circuit board.

[@Mymatevince]

@@HavingFunRepairs Yeah I still use a tone and probe (oscillator and amplifier) for tracing cables in my own house 🤣 I helped out an electrician once years ago in a new build house. Huge house with gym, cinema room, sauna etc. and the tone and probe was so useful to trace all the cables, data, coax and audio cables. I presume a fox and hound is another name for it, so a cable tracker that puts a beeping tone down the wires and you use a wand the other end to locate the cable, and then short out the correct wires to make the beeping stop 👍👍👍👍

[@dash8brj]

What an interesting bit of kit. I bet it's also yellow to make it stand out so it would be obvios if someone had it that shouldn't (aka it got pinched off a jobsite).

[@TheTkiller9999]

its doing it by time... it knows the speed in that type wire... so when it sees the signal return (because the signal bounces off the end of the cable) it can tell you where the break is. this is also how the fiber testers work...

[@Diikiey]

More likely a serial port over a vga cable

[@BuyitFixit]

Thats's pretty much what I was thinking too.

[@poormanselectronicsbench2021]

7:20 It figures that, a "telecom repair man" wouId cut and re-splice a wire with a "Jelly Crimp" ( 3M Scotchlok was the preferred brand in the US) God forbid they actually disconnected a proper connection or terminal point to test something 🤣 . I retired from being a "Cable Splicing Technician" for almost 42 years, starting back in 1979 , with Illinois Bell (which changed to Ameritech, then SBC, then back to AT&T ownership) and I got to use a few different TDR's , ranging from an old boat anchor CRT Biddle to a Riser Bond 1270 LCD screen unit ( My Favorite) in its own weathertight box with some nice hooks on it for hanging from an aerial cable. They were very handy for finding simple and complex "capacitive" faults (such as split pair wiring, water in poly insulated cable that didn't cause shorts or grounds yet) And I even often used one for "Conformance testing" on new cable/terminal install jobs in new subdivisions. With some math, and reading our work prints, I could easily isolate a fault to a specific splice measurement and with the help of another tech, get them fixed quickly. The toughest thing was to get the "VP" ( velocity of propagation) value correct to the cable you were hooked up to to get the most accurate measurement. Towards the latter part of my career, I graduated to working on network fiber optic equipment and using a "OTDR" ( optical version of) which had very similar functionality but dealt with an optical instead of electrical signal. Fun repair video 👍

[@badwolf1984]

That screen is a 16 pin LCD, off the shelf jelly bean module, as these where low volume production it made more sense to design around the LCD than it was to incorporate an LCD into the main board. Also hole for VGA, try rs232 9PIN Serial port.

[@wimseffelaar8950]

So does this machine work with the Wheatstone bridge principle? It does sound like it…

[@Tim_3100]

What an interesting device

[@GadgetUK164]

Awesome Vince! What a fascinating bit of kit! It has me wondering how it can measure the distance to an open circuit?!?! It must pulse one wire and sense on the other, and calculate the distance based on time taken to receive the pulse?!?!

[@ToomsDotDk]

it use time-domain reflectometer (TDR) to send pulse down the line and then it is reflected back

[@Mymatevince]

Thanks Chris, yes I think you're correct. I forgot it was called a TDR when I was filming. I should have remembered that as I had to buy one when I left BT and it wasn't cheap! As ToomsDotDk mentions Time Domain Reflectometer so it sends a signal out and measured the reflected signal back. I presume if it was calibrated to suit, any cable could be measured such as coax and data 👍👍👍

[@walterroszko6841]

Sorry Vince I yawned all the way thru, But I love your vids,

[@C0mmentC0p]

A few years ago we had a technician service one of the green cabinets and had apparently made a mistake with our phone line and someone elses, they said they had become "crossed". Still unsure what it completely meant but I think calls to either of our landlines were going to one or another's house.

[@599miata]

Super interesting Vince.👌👌

[@GertrudeFilthbasket]

great fix!

[@RSG003]

Excellent video as normal always been interested in working for BT and openreach. Did you ever use a Davy/miners style lamp in the man holes?

[@Mymatevince]

Thanks Ray, I didn't. The areas where we worked all the man holes we went in were only joint boxes a meter or so deep. I think I only went in a proper man hole (deepish with a ladder) 2 times and that was a 2 man job, one up the top and one down the hole 👍👍👍👍

[@eddiejones.redvees]

I never use to have one in my kit when I use to help out on faults I use to play hunting the dial tone to the diss but my main job was a pole tester and we were eventually ring fencing when health and safety complained about the pole test cycle getting behind

[@tonycalow708]

Vince, your TO or line manager would have taken the unit to a TSVC, swapped it for a `new` one, and the old unit would be scrapped. The cost of repair would have been too high. I worked in the Exchanges ripping out the Strowger equipment ready for System X or TXE4 to be installed.I loved every minute of it, but with BT, they saw they`d taken on too many people in 1990 and needed to thin down the numbers so I took the PILON (pay in lieu of notice) redundancy package. A very sad day when I said goodbye for the last time.

[@Mymatevince]

Thanks Tony👍👍👍

[@RetroTechRepair]

Hi Vince another great video. As others have mentioned a TDR... but my question is will you be trying to fix a yellow Austin Maestro Van? Let me know I'd love to team up on that one. LoL. Loving the content as always. Interesting and imaginative stuff. Very enjoyable.

[@Mymatevince]

Hahaha...well my dad had one of them, ex BT one but not yellow, it was sprayed grey when the BT piper logo came in. I did a few fixes on that over the years for him. Best one was one of the back wheels kept braking into a skid under normal braking conditions. Turns out there was a simple valve that was stuck open with corrosion near the back. It should have only opened up when the vehicle was fully laden. Shame KZbin wasn't around back then as it was a nice fix😂 You got any videos lined up, I'm having a few withdrawal symptoms!

[@RetroTechRepair]

@@Mymatevince Oh remember the grey... in fairness I reckon the Rolls is a more your style... I'd love to drive that. I remember those valves too. Brake proportioning valves, the rear brakes are smaller so need less pressure. I bet it was a "hoot" with that stuck open! Sadly the channel has temporarily taken 2nd place to my 3rd job. But I should be back down to 2 jobs soon. I have plenty of footage but really find the editing a chore. There will be a new short video soon though. Hopefully this week. A collaboration... not as big a channel as yours but still a good way but bigger than mine!

[@Mymatevince]

@@RetroTechRepair I feel that pain with the editing. Intrigued by this collaboration...I will look forward to it 👍👍👍