I know this is a year later, but THANK YOU! I bought cable lacing supplies for my open air computer chassis rebuild, to lace the individually sleeved cables for better management... but I hadn't considered it as an option for 3D printers. Doing a hotend rework (E3D V6 with Bondtech BMG being replaced with a Hemera with the Volcano hot side, titanium heatbreak, copper plated block, etc.) and I was thinking about the best way to manage the wiring. I have done looms, sleeves, cable chains and etc. before, but for some reason cable lacing just slipped my mind. How did lacing work out for you on your printer? Thank you for the inspiration, because that's precisely what I'm going to do now!

I worked on Siemens, 3000 type, and Ericsson Crossbar. I used to have a couple of reels of waxed lacing twine, but I think I threw it out when we sold the house. However, just the other day, I found tools from my GPO 3000 type exchange days, my old spring gauges, feeler sets, stroking tools to set the contact tensions, and the armature bender! I used to have a screwdriver for unscrewing the sockets and lever switches on the switchboards from the back, it was bout 3 ft long and was inside an outer sheaf with a fixture that held the socket in place, this has vanished!

Same: I used to commission large Philips PBXs...!

I'd love to see those photos :)

I greatly respect your skill Victor. I have a Klann console from 1967 in my home and the wiring and lacing is immaculate. I was taught how to do it at my college in 1967-8 but i could never make it look like that!

Bring on tracker actions! Okay you still have all the stops and registration and the combination action, surely fully pneumatic would be simpler.🤣Lacing a loom or form is easy, block lacing 600 cables that is a different story. Even the Boardwalk would not produce a really large cable block. I don't know much about the Boardwalk but I believe that its original registration system was fully pneumatic but the console was and is electric. One day I must get back to looking at organ actions, it has been years.

That was true of all Bell System offices, the workmanship was beautiful! Then I saw the inside of a GTE s/s office, I was shocked at the sloppy work! Cable racks were overloaded with cables just thrown up there. They were so heavy, they were bowing down with a single pole propping them up!

Yeah! I remember seeing lots of lacing back in the good ol' valve days. Mostly military and commercial equipment but not in any consumer electronics. And I've seen (and worked on) early color television sets with point to point wiring. Certainly they could have used lacing in these beasties. At least for the power buses and non RF stuff. They just didn't. Nevertheless those were the days :)

In a very unfortunate incident, I had to go back to an old exchange that I had a hand in building while the recyclers were reclaiming the equipment. It was an Ericsson Crossbar Telex exchange. I have rarely been so depressed in my life, they used a wrecking saw to cut through the cables, cut the U-bolts on the top iron and pushed the 10 ft high racks over, they crashed onto the floor making a horrible sound while tearing the bottom plates off the floor. I was also there when they scrapped the much older Teleprinter Repeater Switching System (I hadn't installed it, but I had maintained it - it used Siemens Motor Uniselectors) , I wish I had walked off with one of the sections of block laced cables (me and a a big trolley, it would be very heavy), all the wires in these old cable were covered in brilliantly coloured silk. Nothing compares when used to restore vintage equipment.

You'll still have bundling issues.

And you will regret it.. 😂

yeah that awesome waxed string...…… ugh

@@netdog713 Yep!

Search amazon for "9-ply waxed twine".

@@ConnectionsMuseum Thanks! Found it.

DigiKey has lacing tape, which you use the same as twine, but it's synthetic and it's flat, so you don't risk damaging the insulation on your wires. According to the pictures in the manufacturers' data sheets, it's not as retro looking as waxed twine but it's not bad. I wonder if sailmaker's twine would work.

And it was so strong too! We used to joke that if the building fell down all the racks and frames would still be standing!

W-E and Bell used a waxed 12-strand cord. The strands were relatively flexible if separated (but stiffer than butcher's twine) but the wax added rigidity.

I too worked at plessy in 68 to 86 on crossbar.

As a cable former in c7

the first time you need to replace a cable n the middle of the bundle and realize that you will either unlace/relace or cut and replace that beautiful lacing you will totally get why velcro is used today :-) As an old school installer/switchman/tolly I guarantee that we would have used velcro rather than 12-cord if it had been invented. I still, btw, have a partial roll of real waxed 12-cord, a lacing hook and a partial roll of that indispensable narrow grey tape, along with various other tools and bits of hareware.

You run in to the same issue as if you had zip tied all the wires together. If you need to replace or run a new cable, either you run it along side the original bundle. Or you cut all the zip ties and do it again.@@justm1ke

The classic tome is _The Ashley Book of Knots_ by Clifford W. Ashley. Another good one, more modern and not as in-depth, is _The Rigger's Apprentice_ by Brion Toss.

Yep, 750 and 500 so tight the the stitch blade wouldn't fit between the runs 🤙

I hate Zip ties, I sliced my arm open on a zip tie while working on a cable bundle, and slipped on a discarded ties on the floor. There is no way to neatly bind 25 pair to a ladder rack, and the amount of cable you can get on the rack is diminished using zip ties. They work for handcuffs LOL

The old guys call it 9-cord, because thats the number of strands of string that the Bell System-type had in it. The more generic name is "lacing twine".

@@ConnectionsMuseum thanks