Carol cable

[eric7379]

I was spooling off some 16/3 SJOOW cable that I needed for a project that I am working on when my hand felt like it was being jabbed with a needle. Upon closer inspection, there was a spot on the cable that had some very fine wires poking through the outer wall of the insulation, almost like it was the individual wire strands from the conductors inside the cable.
Kind of hard to see in the pictures.

I looked at the rest of the spool, and sure enough, there were several spots on the spool that had this same damage. This came from the manufaturer like this. I looked at the lengths of cable that I had already cut off and, sure enough, there were several spots that had this same damage. At this point, I rounded up all of the cable that I was using as well as the rest of the spool and am having our purchaser contact the supplier to see if we can get a new spool.

No, I did not even bother with opening up the cable to find out what the damage actually was. At this point, I do not trust any of the cable from this spool. Now I am going to backtrack to all of the places that I have used the cable at in the past month to see if there is any more damage.

Anyone else ever see any kind of damage like this on a spool of cable?

 

[Volta]

Kind of. Not with cord, but with MC / HCF cable. It wasn't strands caught in the covering, but the red conductor's insulation split every ten feet or so. That was my first post on this site. The distributor paid for us to replace what had been installed, multiple coils were affected.

Glad you caught it in time.

 

[wireguy8169]

No never seen that before, I once found a solder splice in the middle of a roll of 12 thhn black good thing I caught it I was on the feed end of a pull. Now that was weird.

 

[iwire]

No never seen that before, I once found a solder splice in the middle of a roll of 12 thhn black good thing I caught it I was on the feed end of a pull. Now that was weird.

If you install a lot of THHN I bet you have installed some of those joints.

I got some MC that was missing a conductor for about 200' of a 1000' spool. :roll:

 

[eric7379]

A quick update:

I checked all of the places that I used this cable at in the past month. Sure enough, every single piece that I used had the same exact damage. Luckily, nothing had been energized yet. Out of the 250 foot spool, I have managed to track down about 200' of it, including what was left on the spool.

One good thing is that the distributor is going to give us a new spool of cable.

 

[hurk27]

A quick update:

I checked all of the places that I used this cable at in the past month. Sure enough, every single piece that I used had the same exact damage. Luckily, nothing had been energized yet. Out of the 250 foot spool, I have managed to track down about 200' of it, including what was left on the spool.

One good thing is that the distributor is going to give us a new spool of cable.

I would be talking to the distributor about contacting the manufacture to cover the labor of replacing the installed part of the cable.

 

[eric7379]

I would be talking to the distributor about contacting the manufacture to cover the labor of replacing the installed part of the cable.

The company I work for is too PC to do that.

The internal politics within the division that I am at, as well as at the corporate level is sickening sometimes.

For example, corporate has a list of "approved" vendors from which we can purchase our supplies or repair parts. Even if we find a part that is cheaper from another supplier, we cannot use the other supplier because they are not on the "approved" vendor list.

Ideally, yes, I would seek reimbursement for the labor. But, I am not even going to bother with it because I know that it will not get me anywhere with management here.

 

[LarryFine]

I once found a solder splice in the middle of a roll of 12 thhn black good thing I caught it I was on the feed end of a pull.

I found a bare "splice" in thew middle of a spool the same way, pulling into conduit at a gas station. I was using my fingers as a comb to keep the wires from crossing a lot, and something sharp poked me.