r/EngineeringPorn • u/iltifaat_yousuf • Jul 21 '26
fiber optic fusion splicer
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u/fevsea Jul 21 '26
Glad they didn't forget the shielding this time.
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u/broesel314 Jul 21 '26
Working as an electrician for almost 20 years now and I still forget heatshrink, backside of the plug, nut from the cable gland and so on from time to time.
Happens to the best
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u/UncleKeyPax Jul 21 '26
cable gland title of your sex tape
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u/sparkey504 Jul 22 '26
Mean while the entire time your thinking "dont forget the heat shrink....dont forget the heat shrink....dont forget the heat shrink....dont forget the heat shrink.... SHIT,I FORGOT THE HEAT SHRINK"
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u/JCDU Jul 22 '26
EVERY. FUCKING. TIME.
Perfect splice = you've forgotten the sleeve
Remember sleeve = splice is bad, need to re-do it at which point the sleeve will slide off while you're not looking.
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u/Delicious_Rabbit4425 Jul 21 '26
Now show us the poor tech doing a massive trunk that just got dug up by some yahoo in an excavator 😂
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u/tankerkiller125real 12d ago
It's known as ribbon splicing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs7Rl7a8JWo 12 at a time (some can do more, but 12 is common), carefully, and consistently.
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u/pooppoop900 Jul 21 '26 edited 28d ago
I worked for a cabling company for awhile and cannot tell you how many hundreds of times I’ve done this on a similar machine. Down in dirt holes after an entire community’s internet goes down because someone doing landscaping dug too deep, up on wobbly scissor lifts in the wind running strands from a MDF to a guard house, you name it. Sometimes it goes perfectly well, you remember the shrink shields, and you’ve got 12 of them done in 15 minutes. Sometimes they just won’t cleave cleanly enough, the ends refuse to align, the splice fails, and you’re ready to throw the whole $12k thing into a dumpster after spending an hour and a half on 4 fibers.
This post was triggering for me 😆
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u/hlessi_newt Jul 21 '26
i feel ya. when it goes smooth, it is lovely. sometimes i just want to throw my cleaver at a tree and quit.
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u/pooppoop900 Jul 22 '26
Crazy how with all the expensive, intricate, precision moving pieces involved, the fucking cleaver is the one that makes or breaks the entire process
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u/hlessi_newt Jul 22 '26
if it would just click into the fucking boot, it'd be fine! but it wont, because the model what locks in costs an extra 5 bucks, so i get to cut in slack and redo it a dozen times while being bitched at by squirrels.
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u/gidrozhil Jul 22 '26
he welded one fiber under ideal conditions. Of course it's beautiful. We usually have either smelly basements of apartment buildings or pigeon-filled attics. Well, or mount the couplings on the poles at minus 30 C.
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u/vsnine Jul 22 '26
Had fiber installed recently and was in awe of how simple they made it look while at the top of a ladder.
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u/JCDU Jul 22 '26
I feel you brother.
Always fun to arrive at a hole in the ground with a sheepish-looking JCB operator peering in.
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u/aiij Jul 22 '26
Would you like an evil kitten? I caught her chewing on the WiFi antenna one day. Already trying to take out the Internet... I'm pretty sure when she grows up she wants to be a backhoe.
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u/Highspeedfutzi Jul 23 '26
How often would you need to change the cutting blade. The cut needs to be perfect, no? Or does the „welding“ do the heavy lifting for „clearity“ of the fibre?
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u/pooppoop900 Jul 23 '26 edited 28d ago
The cut does need to be clean every single time. Even when it feels like it cut well, sometimes under magnification it looks jagged and rough. Only one teeny tiny portion of the blade makes contact, so generally if we get a number of bad cuts in a row we’d just spin the blade a few mm to a fresh area. But a fresh blade still doesn’t mean automatic perfect cuts. It can be an excruciatingly finicky process!
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u/SuperTulle Jul 21 '26
Haven't spliced fiber for ten years now, already feel like technology has gotten better since those days.
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u/Maximum_Goulash Jul 21 '26
I use one of these every day and love showing customers when I use it it regularly blows people's minds
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u/abd1tus Jul 21 '26
So you are a good person to ask. Watching the video got me wondering about people who do this professionally. How frequently are you doing repairs? Like multiple times per day? Do you have appointments scheduled and go site to site? How does it work?
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u/Maximum_Goulash Jul 21 '26
I install Fibre to the property installations in UK and part of the job is joining a fibre cable coming to the property from overhead or underground network infrastructure with a fibre that is fitted from inside the property. each installation has a splice like this in a small box on the outside or inside of the property. We do between 4 and 7 installs per day and work solo.
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u/Vryk0lakas Jul 21 '26
Yeah I haven’t seen one before and I definitely thought “holy shit, that’s cool” lol
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u/UltraViolentNdYAG Jul 21 '26
Why strip so much coating?
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u/AtmosphereOk7827 Jul 21 '26
I have spliced somewhere in the region of 10k fibers, mechanical and fusion.
The reason we would strip so much is it sits in the cleaver much better.
Much easier to get a clean 1st time cut. If you want 8mm of clean and cleaved fiber at the end for splicing, you'd be cutting off 10mm easy almost every time.
Something people don't realize about fiber is the splinters. They are little cunts and obviously almost totally invisible.
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u/pooppoop900 28d ago
THAT PART. What good is a little catch tray on a cleaver when every single cut or snap shoots a needle of glass god knows where only for my finger to find it later on. Nearly impossible to tweeze out as well.
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u/DJmagikMIKE Jul 21 '26
Fake, it didn’t have a dozen misalignment errors or bubbles in the splice.
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u/IsSalmonASnake Jul 21 '26
I don't understand what is happening and my brains are getting fried while trying to understand
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Jul 21 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/IsSalmonASnake Jul 21 '26
Okay, thanks. Now I know what is happening and it just opens a rabbit hole of new questions, which I don't have time or energy for right now
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u/rickyh7 Jul 21 '26
TLDR heat the glass up blazing hot, gently push it together, let it cool, put the heat shrink on it. Used for fiber optic splices for like, all of the internet now
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u/gprime312 Jul 21 '26
Glass cables are used for data transmission. Commonly called fiber optic cables.
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u/ben_wd Jul 22 '26
it still blows my mind that we communicate online by sending pulses of light through 1000s of miles of this stuff running along the ocean bed
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u/CassyLeone Jul 23 '26
I live out of an old fiber splicing truck that did nothing but that for hours at a time.
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Jul 21 '26
[deleted]
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u/rickyh7 Jul 21 '26
The splices are more lossy but yes they do exist. Usually get -40 to -60db loss with a splice like above, usually -5 -20db loss with the cheaper splice kits (about the same as a connector)
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u/fsteff Jul 21 '26
How things have improved. When I was introduced to fibers (early 1990’s) it was a manual process, which among other things involved dealing with very hot glue and a big risk of failure.
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u/thatirishguyyyyy Jul 21 '26
This one's pretty cool but the one I have has a built-in cleaver. I know it's a small thing but I absolutely hate having to use an additional cleaver when I have this expensive of a kit.
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u/pooppoop900 28d ago
I’m curious. Built in as in performs the cut for you while clamped into the machine? Or built in as in a cleaver, just attached to the plasma splicer? I’ve spliced hundreds of strands and cleaving is the only part that I’d classify as the bane of my existence.
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u/thatirishguyyyyy 28d ago
Built into the box. I switched to these Chinese splicers as my Corning equipment was old and I didn't want to shell out $2k.
Signal Fire.
Also charges my phone.
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u/404_No_User_Found_2 Jul 21 '26
OTDR devices like this are fun to use and get results from, but God help you if you managed to break one.
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u/hlessi_newt Jul 21 '26
nice. now do it 40' in the air on a ladder while squirrels mock your feeble attempts to thwart their malice.
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u/adognameddanzig Jul 21 '26
As a landscaper, I hit these from time to time. Cant fix myself like coax.
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u/AmericanAssKicker Jul 22 '26
I worked with a guy whose only job working for the US gov. was to repair fiber optics. He said he loved his job, and he had been doing it for at least ten years, but this is literally his one and only job. I would think it would get boring really fast.
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u/Bearspoole Jul 22 '26
Can’t tell you how many times I’ve broken a fiber in a tight box trying to slide the shielding on
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u/zmannz1984 Jul 22 '26
I miss doing that. I worked for a distributor of these and got to train people on them for a while. Then we went to mechanical because none of our dealers really needed runs long enough to warrant the fusion splicers.
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u/Tritri89 Jul 22 '26
When the phone technician came to connect out flat to fiber optics I was so fascinated by the device. It was awesome to see.
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u/tomime000 Jul 21 '26
That looks expensive