ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade Non-US Electrical Systems & Trades Secondhand Appliances?

Here in Austria junk stores, flea markets,... sell whatever junk they want. The buyer has to know whether it's safe. Some time ago I bought a slide projector with a rubber cord which had the bare copper sticking out. The flea market guy plugged it in right in front of my eyes! And he's a policeman!
An ugly thing are old UK appliances without plugs getting to Austria. When I was about 9 or so I found an old reel-to-reel tape recorder at a dumpster. It had a 3x0.5mm2 (or probably the British equivalent, anyway, it was scarily thin) flex without a plug. Back then (prior to ECN) neither me or my dad knew anything about foreign color codes, so we had to guess. Our first guess was according to our good old system: Black is phase. Red is ground. So green should be neutral...
Electric irons have always had cloth cords except for some very cheap 80ies models, and the classic black7white zigzag pattern cord is still available at every hardware store in 2.5m pieces. Individual conductor insulation is rubber. Price used to be 80 Schilling for that piece, which would come to 2,30 Euro/m.

Cotton-covered flex is still widely available here as well. Below the woven-cotton is a rubber outer sheath, with rubber-insulated conductors:



The outer covering comes in a variety of color schemes: Black with yellow threads or zig-zags, black with white, white with black threads, white and gray, etc.

It's only common application these days is for irons, although it used to be quite common for hot plates, curling tongs, and other similar appliances in the past.

Unfortunately for vintage iron collectors (there are some!) you can no longer get it to the old color code.

Twisted twin flex used to be common on some items, but fell out of use with new regulations in the 1970s. There was a heat-resistant version of it, which you can still sometimes see hanging on ceiling lamps in some older houses which had each conductor of the twsited pair individually covered with cotton over the rubber or PVC insulation.

Some weird UK shop still sells twisted cord, I think it's 20 pounds/m!
I have a real old twisted extension cord I suspect it is from the UK as the conductors are black and red inside the brown cotton covering. Still in pristine condition, so I use it to power my old soldering iron and other small items like cell phone charger, radio,...
That type of cord used to be real common before and shortly after WWII here. It was also very common for surface-mount fixed wiring on porcelaine or glass insulators, and there are some houses where such wiring is still in use with 230V, for example a real old farm (oldest parts around 1500, latest extension 1905, along with the first electrical wiring) where some relatives of mine live. The wiring is real beautiful, after I get the film developed I'll post some pics of K&T wiring and porcelaine rotary switches.
Concerning flea markets and other second-hand sales there'S an unwritten law here: if you buy faulty equipment it's _your_ fault, not the seller's, _you_ should have noticed. It's usually a good idea to first visually inspect and the plug in everything before buying. The sellers usually tell you everything works, even if you can clearly see all tubes in the radio are missing for example. Or they say they plugged it in and everything worked fine, even if you can see a dead arcing short in the cord. It's the eastern mentality. Some people say the balcans start in Vienna.

Sadly, there are those in this country (and elsewhere) who would seek to regulate such sales out of existence.

I don't see a problem with the principle of caveat emptor in these situations. If someone at a flea market is selling an item "As seen, no warranties" and the buyer accepts that, then that's his choice. It's then his responsibility to see that the item works as intended and is safe.

More power to Vienna and the Balkans!

There are some specialist supply companies who carry replica vintage wires and cords, along with all sorts of other useful bits and pieces for those of us who restore old equipment.

Antique Electronic Supply (Tempe, AZ) is one such:
www.tubesandmore.com

The only old radios i've come across over here in ireland had non-polarised cords i.e. twisted cable pairs.

My grandmother's old radio which still works to this day was originally connected to a 2-pin plug designed to be engaged in a schuko outlet. A bright spark relative cut it off and fitted a modern BS1363 plug. The cable came loose and fell out tripping the RCD because it somehow contacted earth!... All caused by the cord grip failing to "grab" the twisted pair.

I put on the old plug again and it's happily using an appropriately fused schuko adaptor, as it had been for years! (and to a Schuko socket before that)

Seemed completely stupid to cut it off, it worked just fine!

However, I've seen vintage radios and lamps with similar twisted pair cords connected to BS546 plugs. HUGE black round ones from the 1940s It looks kinda STRANGE

Requiring modern cables and plugs is a bit like asking vintage car collectors to fit bumpers, crush zones, air bags, modern seat belts etc

I did find an ancient 1930s dial telephone here with an RJ11 crimped on cord ... looked VERY wrong!

The correct way to do it: RJ 11 to Ancient 1930s phone socket/junction box to phone Looks a lot more authentic.

Although i guess the fact that when you pick it up you get an modern digital Alcatel exchange dial tone, ring tone and announcements isn't too authentic either

Actually on that point: Does anyone here know if there were different standards for pulse/loop disconnect dialling?

We have an old japanese (we think)phone (60s/70s), rather cool sony thing.. works fine on the direct phone line (Alcatel E10 switch) but won't work at all with our internal system even though it's supposed to understand pulse dialing. The pulses seem to be VERY fast in comparision to anything i've ever heard before. it's almost as fast as tone dialling.


[This message has been edited by djk (edited 09-14-2003).]

Three years ago I was in Cali (Colombia) and staying at my cousin's house.

I noticed his wife's 40-50 year old flat iron (made in Colombia by General Electric) had a cloth cord where the outer jacket was so chewed up she had actually made a sleeve for it (she's pretty talented with the sewing machine).

The rubber strain relief boot was also chewed up (must have been a dog or something that got hold of it).

The replacement snap-together dead-front rubber plug someone had fitted ages ago was also crumbling. It was so bad that you didn't even need to pry out the front with a screwdriver anymore - it all just puled apart with one good yank and lots of sticky black flecks get stuck all over your palms.

So one day I took the heel plate of the iron off, detached the cord and boot and went downtown to an electrical supplier. I showed him the cord and asked if he had more of the same.

"No, we don't sell that stuff anymore."

He then produced a hank of 18/2 HPN (heater parallel neoprene) with crimped ring terminals at one end and a molded plug on the other plus a new strain relief boot.

Iron's back in business.

Why don't the European appliance manufacturers use the neoprene jacketed cords for their irons and hotplates and stuff? That cloth stuff seems sort of archaic to me.

Then again I was never a big fan of it to begin with.

I have an Australian Astor radio. Small table-top plastic transistorized set from the 1970s or something. It's got like 9 or 10 feet of cord covered EARTHED flex in the old black/red/green colour code.

Picture the flex on the back of your computer, now instead of a black or tan jacket, picture it wrapped in grey fabric. That's what it is.

The conductors are insulated in thermoplastic so they're still sound. However, the cloth jacket has unraveled in a few places. I will most likely replace it with a hank of American cord when I get around to tinkering with the innards and cleaning it up... it's three-conductor from a vacuum cleaner and matches the color of the radio....so it won't look that out of place.

Why did Ozzie radio manufacturers have to make the cords that LOOOOONNG? Was it so you could plug the radio into the lightbulb socket hanging from the ceiling?

[This message has been edited by SvenNYC (edited 09-14-2003).]

Most heating appliences used to have those cords.

I remember "electric fires" with them.

Most irons still have them, actually are they required to have them?

They are very poor at withstanding mechanical ware and tend to fray where the cord rubs over the ironing board after a number of years.

Ours goes a step further 5 core + steam

Live, Neutral + Earth, two smaller signaling cables to control the steam and a tube carrying steam to the iron from the steam generator base unit

A twisted twin cord wired to a 15A BS546 plug does indeed look rather strange. A favorite trick for getting a proper grip on these cords with BS1363/BS546 15A plugs was to wrap several turns of insulation tape around the cord to increase its diameter.

THe smaller 5A BS546 plugs looked a little better with such cords, and often grip fine without this treatment.



Neoprene cords have taken over to some extent here, and you'll see them on plenty of heating appliances, including some newer irons.

I guess we're just attached to our cotton-covered cords. By the way, the fancy way to keep the trimmed cotton ends of these cords neat and tidy for termination is to apply heatshrink, but the average person just uses the tape trick again.

I can't think why they would attach 9 or 10 ft. cords to transistorized radios.

Some long cords on 1940s/early 1950s vintage radios actually contain an asbestos-insulated dropper resistor as a third conductor in the cord. These sets typically used a series-filament chain on the tubes, with the voltage adding up to 120V or thereabouts. When the same designs were released in Britain, a very long cord was needed to drop the 240V supplies down to the correct voltage for the filaments.

Apparently some people didn't realize the necessity for the long cords and shortened them, so over-running the tube filaments.


I think you'll find that some later foreign telephones would operate at 20 pps instead of 10. Step-by-step switches couldn't keep up at that speed, but crossbar and electronic exchanges could use the faster pulsing.

There are also differences in the specified make/break ratio in different countries, generally 60/40 vs. 67/33, although most switches would keep pace with either unless they were way over on the opposite end of their tolerance.

For sounds of the old telephone networks, I can thoroughly recommend the Phone Trips website. It's mostly American, but there are a couple of audio files of the British supervisory signals circa 1971 as well. Many of these were still in service from the 1940s or earlier.

Paul,

Never actually heard a step by step switch but there were quite a few crossbar systems in operation here until the early 90s as local switches.

Our local ericsson ARF made some weird noises when connecting a call. You tone dialled the number it made a beep, you'd hear a string of very fast MF tones then tick tick tick tick tick tick (sounded like a clock) clunk.. and ringing/busy or else an announcement which was obviously from its digital AXE or E10 parent as it had words "stitched together"

The ARF's own announcements sounded very authentic! tick tick tick tick tick CLUNK and "The number you have dialled is a spare number" on a very worn out tape complete with crackles and background noise usually spoken by someone with a very strong regional accent. The modern ones are obviously studio recorded phrases stitched together as necessary.

Strowger step-by-step switches were the mainstay of the British GPO network for decades.

Here's a short WAV file of GPO Strowger switches stepping. (This is the actual mechanical noise in the switch room, not what you would hear when dialing.)

The first chain of clunks is the selector stepping vertically at about 10 pps under control of the dial. The second, much faster almost rasping noise, is the sound of the switch rotating horizontally to find a free circuit to the next selector.

The remaining two series of clunks are the sound of the last two digits of a dialed number stepping the final selector (called a connector in the U.S.) first vertically and then horizontally to select the called line.

If you listen carefully, you can hear that the three digits dialed in this recording were 958.