[AT] One additional wiring note

[charlie hill]

Yes Cecil,  I was familiar with that wiring practice, having seen it in lots 
of farm houses as a child.  It just never occured to me that I was living in 
a house that had it, that it was in such bad condition and that so many 
appliances had been added on to the system.  I was quite a shock when I 
discovered it.  Particularly the discovery that the bare wires were sagging 
down and touching flamable parts of the house structure.   There were lots 
of those old houses down this way.  This particular one supposedly started 
off with 2 rooms and a side porch.  That portion of the house was said to 
have been a slave house prior to the civil war.  Then side porch became a 
hall when two identical (but reversed) rooms were added to the other side. 
It had a very high pitched hip roof with roll tin roofing.

I actually liked the house a lot.  It was on a big lot, back off the road a 
bit and it just felt like home.  Very peaceful although not very comfortable 
in the winter.  When I moved out a friend of mine moved in.  He was later 
able to buy the place.  (quite an accomplishment since it was part of a 
large farm and had been in the same family since Revolutionary war times) 
He fixed it up a good bit and is still there.  I guess I should stop by and 
see what he has  done with it.

When I lived there the landlord had a D-10 Allis with a 3pt hitch mounted 
log skidder rig that was the slickest thing I had seen before or since.  I 
don't know where he got it and have never seen another one.  It had a PTO 
powered winch and a set of fairleads for the winch cable to run through. 
There was a dog to hold the end of the log secure once it was pulled up to 
the tractor.  Seems like it might have had some sort of outriggers to use 
while winching but I don't remember for sure.  A couple of times each winter 
he would  go back in his woodlot, cut  a big straight white oak, limb it and 
drag it to my house where he would cut it in blocks.  He left the splitting 
to me but the wood was included in the price of the rent.

I guess I can claim credit for the house still existing.  It was getting in 
disrepair when I talked him in to renting it to me.  There were holes in the 
proch deck where the cows had wondered up there and stepped through the weak 
spots.  If I hadn't moved in it and fixed it up a bit when I did it would 
probably be gone now.

Charlie
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Cecil E Monson" <cmonson at hvc.rr.com>
To: "Antique tractor email discussion group" <at at lists.antique-tractor.com>
Sent: Friday, December 10, 2004 7:05 AM
Subject: Re: [AT] One additional wiring note


>> I had just moved in a few days before.  It was winter time and about 8:30 
>> pm
>
> on a Sunday night.  I turned something on and a fuse blew.  I found the 
> fuse box
>
> out on the front porch.  It was one of those old fuse  boxes with the 
> disconnect
>
> lever on the side.  I opened it up to find NO main fuses,  2 holes for 
> glass
>
> fuses and only one, now blown, 30 amp fuse.    That's right the whole 
> house was
>
> running on one 30 amp fuse.  Well except for the kitchen stove that was 
> wired up
>
> seperately some how. ( I don't remember now just how)
>>
>> It gets worse!  I decided to search out the wiring circuits.  What I 
>> found was
>
> 2 wires about size 12 maybe that ran in seperate strands on porcelin 
> insulators.
>
> This was run on top of the ceiling joists in the attic.  I crawled up in 
> the attic
>
> and found a horrible sight.  The wires had gotten so hot that they had 
> burned the
>
> cloth insulation off and had sagged down onto the ceiling joists, pine 
> bead board
>
> ceiling material and the little bit of insulation someone had put in years 
> before.
>
>
> That is a good description of "knob and tube" wiring, Charlie, and it
> was commonly used all over the country around the turn of the century. 
> Yours was
> wired in the open using "knobs", as they were called - porcelain 
> insulators that
> were supposed to hold them up off the joists. The wiring in my house in 
> the
> attic used more "tubes" in that the floor joists in the attic were drilled 
> and
> porcelain tubes inserted that the wires ran thru. It was common to find 
> bare
> wires everywhere, especially when mice had chewed the cloth cover or the 
> rubber
> insulation off. Sometimes I think the summer heat just disentegrated the 
> rubber
> and it fell off.
>
> The single 30 amp fuse was also common and it was OK back when all
> people had were lights and maybe a fan or two but once they started using
> electric appliances, the system was underpowered and dangerous. Mine was 
> one
> of the more elaborate installations with main fuses and 220 VAC in the 
> house.
>
> I felt the same as you about the danger of it and was glad to get
> it out of my house.
>
> Cecil
>
> -- 
> The nicest thing about telling the truth is you never have to wonder
> what you said.
>
> Cecil E Monson
> Lucille Hand-Monson
> Mountainville, New York   Just a little east of the North Pole
>
> Allis Chalmers tractors and equipment
>
> Free advice
>
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