I've never had much luck with just stripping the 900 fiber, I always have to use alcohol.
On Thu, Sep 10, 2020 at 6:47 PM <ch...@wbmfg.com> wrote: > I have always been the boss of the fiber splicers. I was a copper splicer > when young and was proud of my ability to average 100 pair/hour. > But other than sales demos and a few training burns I have never done > much. > > So last week I jumped in to splice some central office entrance cables. > This can’t be too hard, right. Well I averaged about 10 minutes per > successful burn over my first 48 strands. Got a little better on the > second 48. Did some reading and some thinking and today, I was getting > almost perfect burns each time. Still slow as I was checking each one of > them with the OTDR before I cooked the heat shrink. > > But this is what I learned: > > > 900um jacket fiber does not need to be wiped with an alcohol wipe if the > tight coating comes off when stripping. It strips clean. > > 250um needs to be stripped and stripped until it looks almost clean, then > wiped with an alcohol wipe. But the alcohol wipe does not need to be brand > new or surgically clean. It is just getting the junk off so it will not > contaminate the cleaver or the splicer. It adds almost nothing to the > success of the burn. Use a little alcohol pump bottle and re-wet your > wipe. No need to use new wipes each time. 90% isopropyl is cheap and > makes one wipe last all day long. > > Make sure to look at the squareness of the fiber in the cleaver. Just > because the little holder clamp door thigy shuts does not mean it is square > to the cutting wheel. You can rotate or wiggle the fiber after it is > clamped a bit and make it square itself up. You must have a 90 degree > cleave and you can get anything but 90 degrees if you try a bit. > > After cleaving DO NOT clean it or touch it or do anything to it. Do not > even breathe on it. Treat it like the building will explode if you touched > the cleaved face to anything. My older hands are not as steady as they > once were but I finally got some muscle memory going where I could put it > in the V groove just past the end of the groove but before the electrode. > The cleaved end has touched NOTHING. > > If you do miss the groove and bump the end into something, expect to > re-cleave. Almost always. Even that tiny little defect is going to bite > you in the ass. > > Make sure to ensure the fibers are square to the electrodes. Just like > the cleaver, you can re clamp and rotate to get them looking directly at > each other and perpendicular to the electrodes. I have my lab bench > magnifier clamped to my splicing table so I can double check that alignment > before shutting the lid on the splicer. > > If one end looks bad it is just not gonna work. Just pop the lid open and > re-cleave before the machine decides it actually is good enough and tries > to burn it. In that case you will have to strip twice and cleave twice. > Just redo it if it does not look perfect. You are just wasting time > forcing it to burn if it does not look perfect. > > Using an alcohol wipes on a cleaved fiber will almost always cause some > kind of core problem. Alcohol wipes fix nothing. Recleaving fixes > everything. > > Don’t blow on anything with your mouth. Use a bulb syringe or canned > air. No matter how careful you will blow, microscope particles of spit > onto things. > > > > > If you have bad cleaves several times in a row, rotate the blade. Bad > cleaves are not just bad luck, or bad fiber. Assuming you put clean fiber > squarely in the cleaver, bad cleaves are caused by a bad spot on the > cleaving wheel. > -- > AF mailing list > AF@af.afmug.com > http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com >
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