Quote:
Originally Posted by Simplicity
Almost 15 hours and counting for waiting for a tow truck.
In the meantime I checked my battery cables and connections and fuse, including removing any tape or shrink wrap and all the connections were very clean and all toned with no problem, including the 40 amp blade fuse.
I'm going to get under the bus, my second home, and try and Trace and tone leads from the battery box.
Here's a picture of my starting battery set.
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I would like to share some info/ real life work experience on trace toning a wire.
I did 8 years as a bell telephone splicer, I worked on cables that were paper wrapped, not vinyl wrapped. We are talking about 1200+ pairs (2400 wires) inside a wrapped cable. Paper wrapped cable is also known as "PULP" cable.
Paper coated wires do not have color codes to follow so essentially would must tone every single wire that you are working / splicing on.
The tone generator has two settings, a warbled tone and a solid steady tone.
I just want to elaborate on why...
The warble tone is a two tone sound oscillating between high and low at a very slow frequency. the problem is that this oscillating signal when looked at on an o-scope will resemble a sine wave on the screen.
A\C current, house power, when looked at on an O-scope is sure enough a sine wave signal.
D\C current, a battery, will look like a flat line on the O-scope.
The caution here is that a sine wave of any size will make its way across a high resistive connection. A sine wave of any size will cause and create an inductive field. Low frequency oscillation, very low inductive field. High frequency oscillation, high inductive field. This is why sine wave or A/c current will bleed over onto the other wires, especially in a high resistive (corroded) state.
If you ever seen two wires wrapped against each other, this is because that wire/circuit might be affected by induced (foreign) signal caused by oscillation of nearby wires. A cat 5 computer wire is a perfect example of twisted wires within a cable. The twisted pair wires will reduce or cancel out any bleeding effect amongst itself, the one pair of wire and not the entire cable unless of course each and every pair in the cable is all twisted pair!
You will see this in a bus, most Throttle position sensors on a rear engine bus will have twisted pair wires going back to the ecm.
A high resistive connection is what causes the static you hear on an old copper telephone line.
When splicing paper cable we used the warble to locate the correct bundle of wires inside the cable and then we switched to the solid tone. This is called "Probing" or "Identification" of the bundle/pair.
The solid tone has NO oscillation, no sine wave, and WILL NOT travel thru a high resistive connection because the solid tone does not have the sine wave characteristic that the warble tone does. The solid tone is a pure DC signal!
In short, to make absolutely sure your wired connection is clean, it is probably best to test the wire with the solid tone versus the warble tone.
If you open up your tone generator it should have a small slide switch in it, at least the older ones do. Not sure if newer one have the switch on the outside.
In short we used the warble tone for identifying and the solid tone for testing the actual wire pair.
I share this only to help better understand how the tone generator works.
Most folks do not know or need to know this info but knowledge IS power!
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