Working at the phone company has brought me back to my roots as a wiring technician on the B-2 Stealth Bomber nearly 20 years earlier. In recent years, the phone company has determined that using plastic zip-ties just doesn’t have the longevity that wax string does so from now on any new work with their equipment gets “12-cord” wax string to tie down cabling. Now fiber optic cables that attach to metal require an additional form of chafe protection which is provided with the “fish tape” material shown in these photos. I have spent the good portion of the last week slowly working my skill up in the cable-stitching art to make it not only secure but neat and clean. This particular cabinet you see here on the left holds a number of fiber distribution panels (FDP’s) and then attach themselves to these large cables out the back that are routed to an underground cable vault to be spliced into the cables running out to the customers in the surrounding area. These cables carry up to 144 individual fibers inside so it is very important that they be secure and protected!
Here you can see a shot of some of the stitching inside the FDP rack cabinet. This particular stitch is called a “Chicago” stitch. What made this job particularly difficult was having to work around the bracket that is in place to protect the cables.
In this shot from below you can see more of the Chicago stitch and how it holds the cables down and keeps them individually separated.