Bow and Arrow from the customers garage to get a wire from one end of the house to the other behind a studded wall with no connection to the cement foundation wall. Tied a string to the arrow and fired it down the lenth of the house. Hit the ground and slid the last 4 or 5 feet to the end where a helper was waiting for it to hit something. Anyone got an apple?

Liquid soap to make sure I could get a wire through a run without redrilling.

A cat with twine tied to it.

Homemade electro magnets out of grounding wire twisted around a bolt... thank you 5th grade science class.

Some of you might want to substitute the mini cross bow for a good sling shot and medium size hex head nut. It fits into the tool box better and the range is 5 times that of any mass produced mini- bows. Happy installing!

nickster...

Your story starts with a visual of a topless girl and leaves us hanging... at the end of the story she is still wearing a bra!

Q... am I on the T&A train now?

When cutting holes in for ceiling speakers I use a whole saw tat matches the sepaker. On the shaft of the hole saw I slip a basketball that is cut in half to catch the dust. Lookscrazy but works great.

I have banged a 4' ground rod through a cinder block wall when my drill was about 3" too short. (Double cinder block). That worked nice but it was a whore trying to get back out.

Chugga-chugga-chugga....choo choo!

What the hell kind of tool is a butch or a fem?


Daniel, does this site have some kind of agent that chooses a really RANK place to move to page two, or did this just happen by accident?

"Lesbians" is a slang term for "dikes"
"Dikes" are short for diagonal cutter
Diagonal Cutters is another term for wire cutters

An old golf club as a push rod.
One thanksgiving or Christmas, I don't remember, I had a unplanned retro run of a piece of cat5 from distribution in the mechanical area of the basement to a point halfway across the finished side of the basement and up to a single gang plate in the first floor office wall. I use the golf club as an impromptu push/pull rod to get the wire across the ceiling w/out taking out too many panels while guests were arriving. I used the ubiquitous coat hanger to pull through the hole I made inside the wall cavity.
It's a matter of pride that you would never allow your parent's home to have wire tucked along the baseboard and then down through a hole in the floor next to the tackstrip, especially in a single story ranch with drop ceiling in the basement!!
Some phone co. guys need to be shot. (cable and sat guys too)

After the house was completed and the customer moved in the he decided that the speakers in his office should be hooked up to the house audio system, not to the stand alone compact system he insisted on originally.
The first floor office was over a rocked bedroom in the basement but fortunately the joists ran the right way and I could see all the way across the house from the unfinished part of the basement. I just had to fish 30' and grab the wire hanging down. Unfortunately the joists were full of plumbing.
My fish rods were just too droopy so I took 3- 8' lengths of vac pipe and glued them together with couplers as I slid them towards the wire. I inserted my fishrods with a hook on the end into the vac pipe. The pipe held the rods up far enough to catch the wire. I just had to saw the vac pipes apart as I slid them and the wire out.

I bought three small neodymium magnets and used a 3ft piece of #12 solid copper ground wire and some heat shrink to recreate the retriever part of LSD's "wet noodle" tool that they sell (for a tenth of what it would normally cost).

try some white out to touch up small goofs in walls and trim

also use toothpaste to clean walls of any black marks

Classic college dorm room trick, Vin! Thanks for the memories of the good-ole-days of impromptu 10-Base2 networks duct-taped over the door frames.

The coathanger-as-a-locator (Jay In Chicago posted [Link: remotecentral.com]) is extremely useful when you just can't seem to get a reference from one floor to another. Been using that trick since I was a wee-one installing Unico and Space-Pacs for dad.

Every day brings us a new challenges. Today was such a day. We had a three hour window to access the floor of a swanky restaurant in river-north Chicago. A logistics screwup cost us 1.25 of those hours so we were pretty well pressed for time and motivated like all hell.

The subwoofer over the bar got hung and secured, many pairs and quads of 14/2 were run, but the final penetration to the coat/equipment room was not going to be done by a fish.

I try to leave the installing to the installer as much as I can but here and there you either a) want to play with tools or b) are the only one really qualified to do the job. Today it was b).

I'll be honest. I'm six feet tall but I weigh 145. The guys with me are taller and have much slower metabolisms. In other words: I'm a skinny freak and they're tubbos. Obviously, I was elected to crawl over the roughly 25 feet of twisting (commercial) ductwork-inside-soffit and squeak thru some absurdly rough and narrow 1/2" rock tails.

Between you guys and me: it was kinda fun being the ferret in the ceiling for a just a little while. At the very least, now I know I have no claustrophobic hangups.