Cabling with Ferrets and other small mammals.

[CyberNerd]

Hi All,

 

Does anyone have experience cabling using a ferret and a dog?

 

We need to pull some fibre along a 90ft length of box section. We usually use year 7 students for tight cable runs, but this time the height can be as low as 4-5 inches in places.

The plan is to tie string to them, put them in the box section and coax them out with food.

Will this work with an untrained ferret? I think the dog may be too big for it.

[pete]

IIRC, someone on here used their groundsmans dog to pull a draw cord.

 

Small radio controlled car with fishing line tied to a heavier line and then to the cable? Bonus points for putting a wireless camera on the front and lighting to detect blockages.

 

If it's a straight run (I assume not though?) a speargun works.

[jumpinjamez]

I dont know if it will work but i would love to see it :-)

 

we used to use an extendible washing line poll or a tennis ball and string, miss those days with my head in the celling.

[Pyroman]

Electrician ferrets!

[CyberNerd]

Radio controlled car is an interesting idea, and we did think about using a cable gun. The problem is that the cable tray is really uneven because it already has huge electrical cables in it, and there isn't enough headroom for a cable gun. A ferret and a skye terrier puppy is arriving tomorrow afternoon. I'm not confident it will be very productive, but I know it's going to be difficult with cable rods.

[korifugi]

All I know is that, despite it's name - Cats are completely useless with Cat5e/Cat6

[Jamman960]

Just hope the ferret doesn't get hungry half way and decide to try eating the other cables;)

[newpersn]

I wanna see pictures of this.... (if it works)

[enjay]

If you do this, can you attach cameras to the ferret and the dog - that would make for an awesome film!

[tommej]

Can't wait for the "how do you get a ferret out of a cable duct" thread

[arwen]

Sounds like it could work. Just dont feed a ferret for that day and put some tasty stong smelling food at the end of the cable run. It should just bolt down it to the food if it's like any other ferret I know!

 

+1 on attaching a camera and recording :-)

Edited December 7, 2011 by arwen
spelling

[enjay]

A ferret and a skye terrier puppy is arriving tomorrow afternoon.

One question - what happens if the dog catches up with the ferret?

[enjay]

Leaving the ferrets out of this for a moment, I've seen this done by attaching some form of balloon to the cable and blowing it down the duct.

[JJonas]

One question - what happens if the dog catches up with the ferret?

 

According to this technical documentation I found you need to send down a goat.

[enjay]

According to this technical documentation I found you need to send down a goat.

 

I cannot give enough rep points for that comment, pure genius!!

[shenley]

Ferrets have been used for years for laying cables Ferrets save millennium concert I first heard about them when Prince Charles married Diana and the BBC needed to thread cables down a pipe.

 

When I've had to do this, I've used conduit rods or a conduit snake. These are cheap to hire Cobra Conduit Duct Rods - Aughton Hire

[enjay]

When I've had to do this, I've used conduit rods or a conduit snake.

Conduit snakes? That's hardcore, what if you get bitten?

[Oaktech]

ok... when the ferret and the terrier arrive, pics or it didn't happen!!

[IrritableTech]

According to this technical documentation I found you need to send down a goat.

Superb!

[CyberNerd]

Well, we gave it a try. It's a fairly long run and we divided into 3 parts. The first, shortest path we used cable rods. These proved difficult, and as predicted they kept getting stuck under existing cables etc. We could do about 2M runs, but anything further took too long removing panels and getting the rods out.

 

 

We then tried a dog. We 'enticed' him into the roof cavity, but getting him on top of the cable tray just wasn't going to happen. ended up just wandering around the roof, whimpering a bit.

His owner thought he'd be right up for it, and had the roof space been higher, I suspect he'd have scampered right to the end.

 

 

Next came the ferret.

 

 

We didn't have particularly high hopes for this little chap, we figured he's just wander back and forth, chew the cables and get himself strung up somewhere in the cavity.

 

All we needed him to do was wander along the cable tray

 

 

and He did it!!!

Not only did he go down the first run, he came back, went down it again, came back and then went down it again - eventually we managed to grab him, retrived the string, attach a rope then pull the fibre through.

Whats more, he repeated the effort on the third run - there was no tangling whatsoever and the cable pulled through more easily on the runs ferretface did than the one we did with rods.

 

 

 

I'm hoping we can get one as a permanent member of the team. At last one of my harebrained schemes has worked out.

[synaesthesia]

That is absolutely fantastic - I'd heard of this before but never actually seen it in action! What a fantastic thread to end the week with

[JonWPS]

Not sure you should have been sticking a dog up there at all, but nice work with the ferret.

[DAZZD88]

This is most definitely EPIC!! Made of WIN!!

[FragglePete]

Seriously? I'm just checking the date, is it April 1st!??? This has cheered me up this morning, thanks!!

 

Pete

[Greenbeast]

Nice one. love ferrets