Photos Courtesy of ThinkGood:











Comments?

[This message has been edited by Webmaster (edited 03-14-2003).]

My only comment is about the apparent fire damage. Lumber was difficult to come by back when you had to cut down your own trees. So any building that burned was often torn appart and the lumber used somewhere else. I've seen lots and lots of burned wood in old houses.

Our house was build with inside walls with
the 2x4s on the flat like that.

maintenanceguy: I hear you on the lumber situation. It looks like the bracket ("pancake?") was scorched as well, and there was a lot of recently replaced lumber in the vicinity, from when the bathroom above was redone.

classicsat: How do you fit a device box into such a small space?

The boxes are 2¼" deep and the studs generally are a little more than 1½" thick with about 5/8"-3/4" lath and plaster over the studs. It's a tight fit. Remember that with "flying splices" with the K&T, the boxes didn't need to be as big as today.

I really like those pointers- often it is not obvious what the photo is illustrating..

Thank you!

They're great for returning letters in the mail, also

[This message has been edited by ThinkGood (edited 03-19-2003).]

As we had some discussions about knob&tube wiring in the international section, here's a pic of K&T European style.



Unlike US knob and tube hot and neutral were together on the insulators and the wiring was always exposed.



a K&T switch (but also sometimes used with flush mount wiring, such a switch was controlling th4 balcony light in my family's 1913 apartment until about 1993)



An ungrounded receptacle, if you look closely you can see the conductors enetering at the top. Usually there was just a single hole for both wires though.





and the matching plugs.

In some very old-fashioned rural houses this type of wiring is still in use. Junctions are usually just open taped splices hanging loosely on the wall. I think the receptacles were of a fused type, either 1 or 2A cardboard fuse (a piece of cardboard or a similar material, sometimes color coded according to the rating of the fuse, about 1x2.5cm, with metal sleeves on both ends), 1 for neutral, 1 for hot.

[This message has been edited by Texas_Ranger (edited 07-23-2003).]