ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area Imaginary scenario: How do you temporarily hook up an electric welder?

Thanks to all of you who replied.
The scenario I illustrated was partly based on truth.

The guy who used to go to sites with his portable welders - with the two strands of THHN with hooks at the ends was a guy I knew in Colombia who was renting a house from my grandmom and he set up his dirty shop in the house (cracked the courtyard concrete slab too).

The big welders in the shop were connected by #12 THHN hooked over nails on a
wooden pattress. The nails were connected to terminals on a knife switch.

In order to activate the welder you would move the red wire (with badly scraped insulation) from a non-connected hook to one of the live terminals on the switch.

This guy was such a tightwad that he used a home-made #18 zip-cord extension to run his spray paint gun compressor.

It was spliced numerous times with masking tape - I guess every time that poor little cord snapped or popped because of the heavy use!! The rubber cord caps were also pretty worn out. Scary....

I have never been to Columbia, but if it is anything like some of the wiring that I have seen in Mexico, "Look Out"! Maybe the Columbians taught the Mexicans, or vice versa.
But you know what they say, when in _______ , do as the ______ do.(fill in the blanks)

Hehehehe..yeah, no kidding. But not when it comes to electricity as far as I'm concerned!!

Don,

Some of it is downright scary... exactly just like those pictures we've seen and worse.

Some of it looks 'proper' at least at first glance though and the problem is not the original installers' fault but fellow 'civilians' who hack up the existing system to do mods - like adding more outlets to a room.

I've seen street vendors in downtown Cali "steal" electricty by running zip cord from a building through a groove in the sidewalk (cemented over) into the gutter, down the street and to their stall.

And you see the taped splices in spots where the wire has broken....all this to run their stupid little laminating machine or juice machine. Come closing time they just unplug their whatever from the rubber female cap poking out of the pavement and tuck the connector into a little hole so it doesn't get stepped on.

Colombia has a code (modified version of the NEC), but almost nobody follows it or cares. Old houses are sometimes wired up by residents or handymen who tend to do the job as cheaply as possible - stapling zip cord to the walls and using obsolete surface mount devices.

That's what this guy had done to my grandmother's house which dates to 1949 and according to her had standard in-wall wiring before this guy messed it up. Ahhh the bauties of being an absentee owner.

Somewhere in the NEC section I think I posted some info on the Colombian Electrical Code...

I'm sure problems like this are not exclusive to Latin America....otherwise we wouldn't have anything to complain about here!! hahahaha.

[This message has been edited by SvenNYC (edited 04-12-2003).]