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.
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