Construction

Construction

I suppose this is a continuation of what I was talking about back in a previous post.  So, Return of the iPhone showed the area I was beginning to work with.  Half of my job is technical, the other half is mechanical. 

The first part started with finding a 2" conduit from the back room to the front room.  There were a few wires in the conduit, so I chased them down and pulled out everything that wasn't in use.  There are still some wires in use, but those can get wiped out later when the equipment moves to the back room. 

Part 2 is to identify what devices need what kind of cables to ensure everything has its own separate wire.  Phone is the only exception, and I run those as one single CAT 5e cable.  We buy cables in all sorts of colors from Deep Surplus.  I pretty sure that's where we bought the boots that will make an appearance later.  We always go with solid core wire, though you can get stranded core wire.  I like working with solid core better. 

We run a lot of plenum cable as well.  Plenum cable is made of different outer material that doesn't create toxic smoke when it burns.  All of our buildings are one story, so to me whether you have toxic smoke in the building is a pointless argument for buying cable that's easily twice as expensive.  But code requires it, so we run it.  I'm not going to fight semantics with a building inspector.  Those guys don't give a damn. 

For this location, we needed 10 different wires, but I only brought 7 boxes of wire to the site.  So that means two pulls through the conduit.  I haven't run that second set of wires through as of writing this, and that's probably going to be part of Monday's work.  After the wires are ran, it's time to mount the cable duct.  I always get a 1GUV1 from Grainger as it is the best width for what we do.  The wire duct is screwed in using Tapcon screws as this wall was cinder block.  Otherwise, I just use course thread drywall screws. 

Up above the drop ceiling, there is piece of 1" wood that rings the outside of the building.  I screwed some zip ties into that to create a path for all my wires.  I hate moving ceiling tiles and finding some lazy jerk just left the wires on the roof.  That's sloppy work and hard to work on later. 

For the board, I used a 2'x4' piece of pre-cut wood.  So I wouldn't have to put every screw through cinder block, I took a 2"x4" and cut it into the width of the board and mounted three of them to the cinder block using Tapcon screws.  The board is then mounted to the 2x4's with wood screws.  Did I mention I painted the board white using some quick dry ceiling paint? 

Anyways.  

Lining the board up on the 2x4 shows me I'm not a carpenter and I need a better eye.  Or the right wood working tools. 

Moving on.  Mounting each device requires an angle bracket, found over in the wood framing section of the hardware store.  I prefer SimpsonStrong-Tie Framing Angles.  They are cheap, easy, and work like a champ to mount things under 20 pounds or so.  To hold the device to the wall requires a strap.  Academy has them for about $3 a piece.   For smaller devices, I use 1/2" velcro.  

 Oh...  and another picture for an out of date update.  

This one shows most of that I've been talking about to this point...  The devices are all placeholder devices at the moment, just to hold the space until the real equipment is built and moves onto the board.