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Talked to a 30-year veteran installer today and he called my cable prep "sloppy"
He showed me his trick of stripping coax with a utility knife instead of my fancy tool and I finished my next 4 drops 10 minutes faster each. Anyone else pick up a weird habit from an old timer that actually worked better than the standard way?
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kellyj232mo ago
That utility knife trick goes against everything you read in the manual but it really does work once you get the feel for it. Had an old lead tech show me how to leave just a tiny bit more dielectric on the center conductor so the connector doesn't push it back and cause signal loss. Sounds wrong but after doing it his way for a month I stopped getting callbacks for low signal issues. The fancy tools make you think you need all that precision but sometimes the old guys figured out shortcuts that just plain work better in the real world.
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paul_burns2mo ago
Yeah that extra bit of dielectric thing is spot on @kellyj23. I was fighting with those compression connectors for months and kept getting these weird intermittent drops that were impossible to pin down. An old timer finally showed me the same trick and I felt stupid for how easy it was. He just said "you're overthinking it, the connector is gonna push that plastic back a little so leave yourself some room." After I started doing that my rework rate dropped to almost nothing. I mean the manual is written by engineers who never have to actually crawl under someone's house at 7pm so sometimes you gotta go with what works. The fancy prep tools are nice and all but your hands and a utility knife can tell you more about the cable than any gauge ever could.
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