Polarised plugs

Hi rosco

Are you ready for some confusion...

Following taken from RPC Website - The Australian standard is that the horizontal pin is the positive terminal (and the vertical is negative). However, in Victoria the top of the T is taken to look like a minus sign, and is therefore negative.

There has also been previous discussion on this site which can be found here.

Cheers

Anthony

Rosco I would get that Multimeter out. The leg of the T should be ground and the top of it +, however there never seems to be a hard standard other than the leg is earth. It is an old 32v plug adapted for vehicles.

The best place for them is in the bin, though that may not be possible if you have a gennie.

If you are talking about the large round plugs and sockets the same size as our 240 plugs but with the pins in a T layout, I agree with others there is no standard for how they are wired. Best get the multimeter out.
My first contact with these plugs was around 1967 where they were used as plugs and sockets to power 2way radios mounted in cars. The radios were pre transistors and built like battleships.
The female sockets to go in the vehicles were mounted on a bakelite plate that had a fuse and terminals all pre wired. The fuse was connected to the vertical of the T by a copper strap. The unfused terminal was connected to the horizontal pin also by a copper strap. Hence we wired the positive to the vertical pin.
We were told it was that way as the horizontal was like the drawing symbol for chassis of the radio in the circuit diagram.
Just a bit of history. ??

Back in the 50s through to the 70s when I used them a fair bit there seemed to be two conventions. One had the pins mounted in a vertical line and the other had them in a horizontal line. In both orientations the pin laying in the horizontal plane was the negative pin. From the above discussions it looks like that convention has gone out the window.