Here Kitty Kitty

Cougars are middle aged women actually. 😉 Oh and due to the cat not touching the ground wire she would have been safe from electrocution on a normal pole but she's especially safe on this one as those are ropes not lines. I work flagging traffic and sometimes we are with the electric guys. They pull rope through first when putting up new line. Then they fasten the new line to the rope and pull that through. Not sure why but that is the procedure. I picked up on the rope because its blue. Its interesting to watch it done.

@Patty -- Lifting rope into place is easy because it weighs next to nothing, and it's flexible enough to go where you want.

The largest wire I've handled recently is 2 AWG stranded copper THHN -- I'd guess it weighs close to half a pound per foot (figure perhaps a hundred pounds between posts), and it's so stiff, God help you if it's kinked in the wrong direction.

It's far faster (and therefore cheaper) to thread the rope and then use it to winch the wire into place rather than having a crew trying to manhandle it twenty feet in the air.

Excellent explanation Phideaux! Thank you very much for your expertise. Do you work in that field? Since you talked about having recently handled heavy wire I was wondering.

With those tiny insulators I was thinking it was phone lines rather than power lines (despite what the article says).

@Patty -- The batteries of my cordless drill were getting old and weak. New ones are insanely expensive. Those battery packs are simply plastic boxes filled with sub-C batteries. But there are no holders -- the batteries are connected to each other by tabs welded onto them. New batteries don't have those tabs.

I didn't have a welder, but I did have the transformer from an old microwave oven. The secondary wire is very fine so there can be a huge number of turns, making the output high voltage (thousands of volts?) at low amps. Strip that out and put in a single turn of heavy wire. Output is low voltage at very high amps, perfect for welding.

New batteries and making the welder cost nearly as much as buying a new battery pack. New batteries for a second one will be about 1/5 the cost of a new battery pack. And I now have a little electric welder suitable for spot welding up to 12 gauge steel!

@Patty: Despite all the technobabble Phideaux foisted upon you the real reason is that it's easier to pull a rope than push one. :lol:

Any reference to 'electricity' is really just wizard code for 'magic' as there is no such thing as 'electricity'.

Wow Phideaux, you must really be a genius at your profession if you are that knowledgeable about a hobby! Very cool!
Expat, that all depends on the effect you have on the rope.

@Patty -- I'm afraid you praise me too highly. Once you know the basic incantations -- oops, I mean understand the fundamentals of electricity, things like that aren't difficult, especially when there are plenty of YouTube videos which show exactly how to do it.