When Gary told me last week that he would need my help with “pulling wire”, I was delighted!  Because I had experience in pulling wire. Or so I thought. Remember our Montrose project and all that wire we pulled?

I learned about marking the wire

How you attach a rope on the end and then feed it through a pipe to where it needs to go –

And then you keep pulling it until you have enough pulled through to get to where it needs to go.

And voila – Neat and tidy and where it all belongs. (Thanks to a guy way smarter in wire things than me!)

Looking back, it all seems so civilized.
This Wire Pulling directive was something entirely different.
First of all the wire. None of that sweet little thermostat wire this time.

We were into the Big Stuff. The Let’s-get-the-power-to-the-rooms wire.
The good news was that we were using 250 ft. coils so that several “home runs” could be done at the same time. The bad news was that we were using 250 ft. coils so unrolling them was something of a challenge. Our first try was not so successful.

Way too spirally to run around the outside channel and actually work with.


Nope. That was not going to work.
So they put together a wire “dispenser” where we could load up 5 rolls at one time.

Once again (just like the more civilized wire pulling) we made sure the ends were marked

and Gary wrapped them all together with the rope and started feeding it to Norm (up on the landing).

Hi, Norm! It’s coming, it’s coming….

Here you go!
Since these coils of wire are not on spools themselves, we couldn’t just pull them up and expect them to unwind. Instead of unwinding,  they would just get tighter and tighter. It was my job to manually unwind all 5 rolls at the same time (well, more or less) while one of the guys was pulling it off the ‘dispenser’ while Norm was pulling it up to the second floor, while the other guys were pulling it all around the outside of the building.
Ready?

and go!


repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat…….
When we had unrolled enough, the guys at the other end of the would work to get it situated into the correct channels.



Needless to say, this was a group project on so very many levels! So far we’ve done 8 runs of wire (5 rolls each). Between the actual “pulling”, Gary gets busy organizing them all!

Yikes!

As he runs the wire to the various outlets and switches, he somehow keeps everything straight,

in a language that I can’t even begin to understand.

While I always enjoy working with Gary, this last stint of wire pulling has made me appreciate anew the more traditional SOWER lady jobs –

Like the mailing we helped with on Monday.
🙂 It’s all good, friends.
All good!

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