October 30, 2004
Walker Duct
John has people moving into his building also -- into an area that wasn't cabled to the LAN. So we gather up the wire and the reels and spend a pleasant Saturday pulling cable. To match the building standard we are using Quad-4 -- four four-pair cat5 cables to each position. Click on any picture for the 1200x1600 pixel version:
We placed the cable reels in the open office, three dollies for a six bundle pull. We need eleven runs, so Doug is laying out a quarter inch rope to be pulled in with the first set of cables. The cables will be pulled into hole A, and once run to the terminal room will be laid out and run to each cube in the room. Pull under the raised floor from hole A (with a man by the reels to make sure they don't tangle) to hole B in the hallway. A person sits at hole A to pull the cables through the turn to hole C. Since there are only three of us (see the entries on the retirees) the third man pulls the cables out of hold C and down the hall, providing slack for the next stage.
Shifting postions, the above slack is fed into hold C toward hole D in the office across the hall. So far this has all been under the raised floor system. At hole D we transition to the older Walker Duct. The Walker Duct was what was used before they came up with raised floors. It is a shallow retangular metal duct in/under the concrete floor. In the middle of a room a hole could be drilled down into the Walker Duct to provide a path for the telecommunications cables. The smaller cross floor ducts rose in a larger feed duct which was just below floor level. In the picture we see the raised floor, E, sitting above the concrete floor, F. G is a steel plate that closed the duct back when the concrete floor was the floor. Below this duct are the cross floor ducts accessed by holes -- hole H and the hole with the fiberglass Snake, S. That snake will pull the cables abut 80 feet from the open office to the terminal room, up thru hole J.
Normally on a job like this we would have used more people to pull from the reels through the three turns and into the terminal room. But they retired. So we do the pull in stages. The second stage pulled the slack in the hall toward the terminal room. Slack gone we shift to the reel-corner-hall positions and pull more slack into the hall. Back to hall-duct-terminal room to pull the slack up. And once again to get enough slack in the terminal room to run the cables up the the corner around two sides and down the the LAN rack to be terminated on the cat5 patch panel.
That was six runs. We need eleven. Back into the room we pull enough cable off the reels to reach the various desks and cut. We also secure these cables so they will not be pulled out by the friction of the next run being pulled in beside them. Tieing and taping five more bundles to the afore mentioned rope we repeat the pull -- off reels to hall slack, hall slack taken to terminal room.
After lunch we push the cables under the floor to each desk, using the lay-up stick. The stick is a multi-section collapsible pole -- five feet to thirty feet. Close up the holes and go home.