Hey guys. Got a question that I have a hunch to what the answer is, but I wanted to see what the 1A2 guys thought. I recently got a pretty good haul of stuff out of a building that's being remodeled. Scored a pile of Western Electric branded colored backboards, a half a dozen WECO diode matrix blocks, and a bunch of 100 pair cabling. Like, a couple hundred feet. I'll finally be able to properly hook up one or two of my call directors. So my question is this. I slit open one of the cables and broke it into its constituent binders, and I was expecting four 25 pair binders, and what I found was five 20 pair binders. Nary a violet lead to be seen. This is the normal looking gray jacket inside wire like any other piece of 25 pair I've ever found, but with no violets. Was this common for inside wire of this pair count, or was this specific to key system cabling? Some of this cabling was used as house cable to bring umpteen lines from the 100 pair protector in the basement to the third floor IDF, and one piece went straight from the basement to one of the offices. Of course some dummy had cut off the end(s) and just plucked out the wht/blu pair from the first binder.

The whole building was wired for 1A2 as far as I can tell. There's 25 pair going from the third floor IDF to every room. Some rooms had multiple 25 pair drops. Some had harmonicas plugged into the 25 pair connectors, some had the ends cut off and a pile of smaller cables beaned to the end of them, one room had a 66 block mounted 3 inches off the floor with the 25 pair cut down on one side and a host of other smaller cables punched to the other side. It was a mess. You could easily tell that Bell had done a really nice job wiring the building for 1A2, and it had been hacked up over the years by every idiot and their brother. The building is an old HUGE farm house dating back to 1792. I was amazed that Bell had managed to snake all those cables through the old plaster walls and wide pine floors without really any trace. Hats off to those workers that originally did that install.

I'll post some pics of my haul when I get some free time to lay the stuff out. I also got some really bizarre jacks that I had never seen before. All Western Electric branded.