Page 37 - ETU Journal Autumn 2017

TESTING
TOMMY
LONGHORNE
Among our museum exhibits there are many pieces of test equipment from days past. And whenever I add to them or rearrange them it takes me back to my days with Tommy Longhorne and sets me on a journey back to the present.
I found myself holding both tails between my ingers, but only briely. I was thrown across the workshop and landed in a heap on the concrete. I picked myself thinking, Oh, I didn’t like that much and suddenly fully aware the stuf I was working with doesn’t discriminate, even when you are a young electrical intern with an eye for the ladies.
They were the good old days, and I was lucky to survive them, I suppose. The lessons were and still are never assume something’s not live and never be complacent. Electricity likes to kill and it’s not fussy who.
For me, 50 years on, the risks are still the same. The way I manage them is not. I was disconnecting a motor the other day above the furnace, bitching and moaning about how hot and
dirty it was and how hot and sweaty I was. It would have been easy to lose concentration but for the culture of respect for electricity that, I have to say, is promoted by my union more than and better than anyone else.
I turned the power of to the motor and tested it, and no not the Tommy Longhorn way, and when I did, I found the motor cooling fan was on a diferent supply. Had I not tested and turned of the power to that little fan I could have inished my trade the way I started it – thrown across the room and into a heap on the concrete. If I’d been thrown from where I was this time it would have been a long hot drop to the loor below and that might have been it for me! n
Always test, always turn of, never work live!!
BY KEN PURDHAM, ETU HISTORIAN
Tommy was an old single bloke with a lat face. His nose was broken and bent over like someone had hit him in the chops with a switchboard door. And because of that bent over nose Tommy snifed and snooked after every few words like he was clearing his sinuses. Back then, I was his 16-year-old apprentice.
Tommy liked nothing better than
to bail me up at his workbench and bombard me with sign-waves, phase angles and formulas chalked onto the work-surface with an enthusiasm hard to keep up with. I’d nod intelligently while my hopes were that we’d get a job in the oices where the girls were. It was in the oices where I got my irst lesson in testing of an installation.
While I smiled gormlessly at the girls, Tommy pulled a power point of a wall and disconnected the wires. Then he said, “See that girl over there, I was telling her about you. I said, ‘He has balls like a bull’ and she said – has he?” While he laughed and snooked I was thinking – you’re not helping here Tommy! Then he licked his inger and swiped it across the bare conductors to see if they were live.
But Tommy was an odd-ball and we did have some real testing equipment. Out on the factory loor it wasn’t the practice to lick your inger and stab
it into a contactor to see if it was live. We had testers! These were 15-watt lamps in series with a resistor, encased in a rubber housing. We’d hang them around our necks like stethoscopes and walk around the factory like all- important electrical interns.
However, we’ve come a long way since those days. The test equipment is more varied and sophisticated and readily available. And this great union is at the forefront of promoting the safety and correct testing of installations so that the lick and the luck is taken out of our survival in our workplace.
But back to the old days. We had a 250v isolation transformer screwed to the workshop wall, ideal for continuity testing. You just put a tail on one end of a heating element and the other tail at the other end. If the element glowed it was good. Of course, even as a 16-year-old I was pretty smart and I knew that I could hold onto one tail or the other but not both. And yes, the day soon came when
See that girl over there,
I was telling her about you. I said, ‘He has balls like a bull’ and she said – has he?
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THE ETU > SUMMER 2016
37