Friday, Apr 25, 2014 at 12:01
Scotch locks on telephones are a whole other story and they are a completly different device.
Telephone wires are solid conductors and come in very narrow range of sizes.
The telephone wire joiners are not intended for mid span wire tapping
the telphone wire joiners are filled with silicon grease to exclude moisture.
AND, if you are complying with instructions you should be using a dedicated tool to compress them...I own such a tool.
EVEN then they fail and can not be compared to the solder joints that preceeded them.
The telstra serial and item number, genuine item, scotchlocks on my own property pole have been replaced twice, because they became unreliable, the whole bulk termination across the road up the pole has been reworked recently because of a similar issue.
The telephone wire terminators are fairly reliable in all situations in the short to medium term.....but in the long term they have issues
They are used primarilly because they are many times faster than any other outdoor jointing method.
BTW. I trained in Telecom (back when we had a phone service run in the public interest and not for corporate profit)....at a time when Krone was just comming in, these scotch lock phone wire joiners where considered new and $#@t hot and would last forever AND we still did a hell of a lot of soldering.
Let me tell you over a 30 year period I'll back the soldered connection over the scotchlock anyday.
The problem with soldering is it takes time and skill....both something most of our modern telephone installers have little of.
cheers
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