Cool toys. Laying fiber.

mikea

mikea

Touchdown! Greaser!
Gone West
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Feb 12, 2005
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Lake County, IL
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iWin
There's a crew running fiber optic cable along the road in front of the house. The county is setting up a system where all of the traffic lights are interconnected by ethernet over fiber so they can monitor status and the traffic and control the lights from a central location in a nearby town.

They moved the equipment to where I have a front row seat. I may have seen it done around the train tracks but it never sunk in how the system works.

They a hydraulic-powered machine on tracks with a line running off to a separate tank truck for water. The machine is a water cooled? ram with a load of pipes in a sling. Each pipe looks to be about 10 feet long. The machine loads a pipe and screws it onto the end of the previous line and pushes and bores the whole thing into the dirt. By where the remote crew goes I gotta figure they can burrow out 200 to 300 feet.

I have no idea how they manage to steer the far end. The road curves and goes uphill ahead! I noticed that they have a digital scanner box that must let them scope out where the bit end is, but how they can turn it is beyond me. At junctions they bring the bit end to the surface. I don't see any sign that the guy in the ram is driving it.

At the junction they attach the conduit and/or fiber to the far end and the machine pulls it back one pipe length at a time like fishing conduit. I guess they make a trench between two junctions. Come to think of it they must have to splice at each meet up point because they pull back to the previous - They don't pull in the direction they travel.

Wild. No wonder fiber runs are expensive but I guess it would be worse if they really had to dig a trench the whole length.
 
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I haven't figured out how they steer those direction drilling things either.

Whenever I see those around here, I know that one of two things, sometimes both, are about to happen: They will knock out power when they hit a buried line, or they will puncture a water line.
 
mikea said:
I have no idea how they manage to steer the far end.
Click to expand...

This is a pure guess: The shaft is hollow which allows the water to pass to the bit. And the bit can be steered by how the water is forced out?:dunno:
 
bjohnson said:
This is a pure guess: The shaft is hollow which allows the water to pass to the bit. And the bit can be steered by how the water is forced out?:dunno:
Click to expand...

The water does seem to at least lubricate the bit. I guess I could ask those guys..or I could hop on it. They parked the thing across the street. :p

They had another load of rods they kept in a pickup. It looks like they double the amount that can fit in the hopper and thusi double the length of the bore. They add more when the hopper is empty and they returned the rods to the truck when they pulled it back.

They worked all day and appeared to get a little more than one run done. They were pulling the previous segment when I drove by this morning and they moved off of the hole of the segment in front of my place.
 
Somehow fiber communications for traffic signals seems like overkill squared bandwidth wise. Perhaps they are also installing cameras?

The steering is done remotely with a radio link AFaIK. They also have to track the progress under the ground and I assume the same equipment that tracks the bit controls the steering. Unfortunately it's difficult to see underground so they can only avoid obstacles that are known. Several years ago an outfit was boring for a cable this way and drilled right through the primary power feed to my office. The ground started smoking for a while and then a fuse blew dropping the entire neighborhood into a blackout that took several hours to fix.

On a marginally related note, the metro sewer folks are planning to bore a 6ft tunnel 100 ft underground for a couple miles and across my driveway. They said they can go about 600 ft between access shafts and they get something like 40 ft per day.
 
lancefisher said:
Somehow fiber communications for traffic signals seems like overkill squared bandwidth wise. Perhaps they are also installing cameras?
Click to expand...

There are cameras and more. More than you ever wanted to know. See slides 12 and up: http://www.itsmidwest.org/events/2006/AM_Session/Khawaja.pdf

Actually in my case, it's that I think I know more than those they were presenting to. :D

Coming soon! http://www.lakecountypassage.com/html/index.html
lancefisher said:
The steering is done remotely with a radio link AFaIK. They also have to track the progress under the ground and I assume the same equipment that tracks the bit controls the steering. Unfortunately it's difficult to see underground so they can only avoid obstacles that are known. Several years ago an outfit was boring for a cable this way and drilled right through the primary power feed to my office. The ground started smoking for a while and then a fuse blew dropping the entire neighborhood into a blackout that took several hours to fix.

On a marginally related note, the metro sewer folks are planning to bore a 6ft tunnel 100 ft underground for a couple miles and across my driveway. They said they can go about 600 ft between access shafts and they get something like 40 ft per day.
Click to expand...

I did see one of the bore crew members putting in plastic flags to mark the spots after the JULIE guy had been through to mark underground stuff with spray paint.

I'm glad they came down the other side of the road. It did a bit of damage to the grass in the parkway.
 
You can rent those machines.

I've been thinking about doing so to bury some cables in my back yard, and maybe even to run piping for a sprinkler system. The other option, of course, is a ditch-witch.... witch probably makes more sense for the yard work. Can't do much right now, though, the ground is hard as concrete.
 
I was involved in power line and phone construction in the 70s when the hydraulic "gopher" first came out - sort of a metal bullet with a hydraulic hammer in it that would burrow under roads. It was completely non-controlled; you dug a pit next to the road, layed the gopher in the pit, hit the hydraulics and hoped for the best. You could somewhat track it by sound or cable locating equipment. We pushed under a road once and the gopher hit a rock and popped up in the middle of the lane ... oops!

This new stuff is amazing!
 
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