Part 2

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By one of the portals of the still operational Shkol’skoye Gold Mine stands this transformer – a typical example of the district. The name of the mine means Scholar as it was discovered by school children! Apparently, on a school field trip organized by the local geological survey, a young girl brought the geologist a lump of quartz and asked him why there was so much fool’s gold (iron pyrite) in it. “Where did you find this rock?!” demanded the geologist. It was not fool’s gold but the real stuff and the goldmine was in production some five years later.

Now down to the domestic scale. Russian wiring leaves a lot to be desired and the only examples I ran across were aluminium. I never came across any grounding that I could prove and two core ribbon cable was the norm.

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Here is a rotary switch from inside a hut at a field camp we stayed at near the settlement of Kulu some 320km northwest of Magadan. The ribbon cable can be made out quite well in this example. Under the soft, semi-translucent plastic coating there were two ~2mm2 aluminium solid wires with no further insulation or markings. Polarity was not indicated and I think is of no concern to the Russian installer.

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Here is the distribution box in my hut. Fuse and a switch that fed two lights and a socket. Hey, we had power and I wasn’t expecting that! Other than that it was kind of basic. The long-drop hut had light fixture but no lamp in it. Maybe it was just as well!

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A loop-in Russian style down to the switch below. Simply break into one of the pair of wires and connect a ribbon pair to the switch. I don’t know how the join was effected under the black tape. There is not a noticeable bulge and the wires are solid aluminium.
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A more conventional switch underneath the loop-in which worked one of the lights in my hut. The other was the rotary one above.




[This message has been edited by Trumpy (edited 06-24-2005).]