atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services Cabling Telephones Systems Wiring Is this normal in the industry ?

those jacks came with the cover plate and the four wires with spade terminals . nothing was connected to the block which is a separate piece. Its not like a jack you get today where it comes with the wires under the screws .The concept was you could attach the cover plate to a existing 42a block in a hardwired situation and turn it modular

so cutting off the unused wires wasn't uncommon , cutting them was quicker than putting them under the screws

I don't understand the Union reference either

I've seen this done in my area on older biscuit jacks that the LEC used. Never understood the reasoning, other than maybe lazyness (not wanting to screw down the 2 leads or leave them loose inside the jack).

Laziness. Too lazy to screw them down and too lazy to tape them. Leave them loose and they might short out the live circuit.

Sam

The same thing is done by the old Bell techs here in Des Moines.

Maybe to generate Revenue when the second pair needs to be installed the same jack.

Non-Union for 14 years; Union for 12 years
Never did that...ever.

I'll be honest here: I've clipped the extra jack leads off in lieu of terminating them many times in the past. Nowadays, I'll coil them up and tuck them into the little pocket to the side of the actual jack itself. Or so I thought I should be doing.....

One of my coworkers advised against this since doing it might short the second pair and many new digital phones have other purposes for the second pair, for example: Vodavi digital phones send information back out on the second pair to interface with ancillary devices.

I wouldn't have terminated anything like that though. I'd have mounted the 42A block on a 735A mounting plate so that I can roll a reasonable amount of slack wire behind the block. That's assuming that the block wasn't attached to a solid surface.

To answer your question about the colors being on the wrong terminal: The original 42A block was used for terminating spade-tipped line cords to station wiring. The later 625A modular jack cover came along, but this same block was retained since the cover could be used to retrofit existing hardwired installations.

The 42A block had a notch to allow the line cord to enter it and there was a slot (look at the block on the left in the picture) to allow the T-shaped metal bracket on the cord to be secured.

This meant that the block should be installed with this opening facing upward. Industry standard was and always has been (at least in slang) right, ring, red. In my travels, I always made it a point to maintain this so that the tip side of line one was upper left, ring was upper right, tip of line two was lower left and ring was lower left. Who cares about the stamping on a block of a blind screw terminal? I always trusted the color of the wire connected rather than the stamped designation.

I don't think that there was anything sinister about having clipped the unused leads from the jack cover. I don't even think it was a matter of laziness. An RJ11C was a two-wire, 6P6C jack with only the red and green wired to the network. That is all they were trying to do.

Even though each jack could accommodate two different telephone lines, wasn't it common to use one for each line? I thought that the Y/BK pair had a specific purpose and...if installed near a KSU/PBX...a splitter would be needed to separate them?

The only time you could use both lines off a jack like that was for a 2-line phone or some other similar situation. Other than that, yes, each pair has it's own jack.

or a 2-line splitter.