Antiques Roadshow?

[acvc]

Has anyone come across one of these before, and when were they about?

There were two of them in a house where I worked recently.

Cheers.

 

[Lucien Nunes]

Anybody come across the Lupus Electrical boards

Last time I saw the original type with the curved front MCBs was in a school maybe 20 years ago. I needed to add a circuit, so I had to search the site for a board with a redundant MCB that I could swap with my blank. Luckily there was an intact example.


Had a few near-misses with C50, e.g. when I dropped a neutral clamp out of a TPN board and it fell astride the busbar in the board below. I had one at home for years, it had a splash mark on the bar, two on the edge of the cover and one on the edge of the body. You can picture the situation...


Anybody seen the grey Loadmaster MCBs? They were only grey for a short time, allegedly because DS couldn't get enough brown/black moulding powder and had to reserve it for making plugs!


It's easy to pick holes in these old MCB boards, but MCBs were a bit of a novelty then especially in the UK and there was an element of feeling the way forwards as we struggled to shake off our re-wireable habit.



BTW is there still lots of C50 on the London Underground?

 

[Dcf]

Ahh this takes me back to dicing with death on live c50/dorman smith/early merlin gerin D boards.
trying to terminate pyros into some of these was a right sweaty experience.
i would like to see some young uns pull the cover off and see the ****e we had to deal with!
ottermill was common on council / government jobs for a while they were a bit tight if I remember right.
did a board change today removing a Wylex 3036 8 way.
The steel was about 2mm thick !
never seen one of them melt into a lump of charred plastic though.....

 

[trev]

Some of the dorman smith ones actually scared me ****less, I don't scare easily but the first few I had my hands in were like rats nests

 

[Lucien Nunes]

DS Loadmasters are the only MCBs I have seen more or less on fire, of their own making. A large, heavily loaded TP board with a couple of the MCBs surviving as a skeleton only - the cases had carbonised and crumbled away. I had to do a certain amount of mix'n'match.

 

[GLENNSPARK]

Still loads of them about, good old death traps them C50s are.

the garage where i take my van has one in there.....

 

[GLENNSPARK]

Ahh this takes me back to dicing with death on live c50/dorman smith/early merlin gerin D boards.
trying to terminate pyros into some of these was a right sweaty experience.
i would like to see some young uns pull the cover off and see the ****e we had to deal with!
ottermill was common on council / government jobs for a while they were a bit tight if I remember right.
did a board change today removing a Wylex 3036 8 way.
The steel was about 2mm thick !
never seen one of them melt into a lump of charred plastic though.....

did some condition reports on squared S line panels....their heavy gauge n all....

 

[Engineer54]

Those old bakelite casing MCB's, be they Fed Elec, DS, etc, etc.... were all based on the Yank breaker design, all as i remember, were supposedly type 3 and were and still are total Crap with a capital C!!! The Stab Lok push in style breakers were even more bloody dangerous!!

Think i'd prefer to see a Wylex 3036 CU/DB with the aftermarket MCB's, than any of those old bakelite breakers!! Believe it or not, those old breakers are still being sold today in the States, and you just wouldn't believe some of the time current curves on many of them.... Our type 4 and type D breakers have nothing on some of them....lol!!

 

[Knobhead]

If I remember right they were magnetic hydraulic trips, hence the terrible trip curves and reliability.

 

[jay sean]

The Solihull council have a lot of ottermill gear in their offices, schools etc, The Coventry council still have a lot of old green federal DBs

 

[Fin170]

Part of decomissioning I went through a few otter mill boards and thought them ok, although I only had to make sure they were dead

However the Reyrolle kit was as good as the day it went in 60 odd years ago

MEM on the other hand, installed less than 10 years ago...rusted right out

 

[davesparks]

That's surprising for MEM kit, was it installed in particularly damp or harsh locations?

 

[Knobhead]

Part of decomissioning I went through a few otter mill boards and thought them ok, although I only had to make sure they were dead

However the Reyrolle kit was as good as the day it went in 60 odd years ago

MEM on the other hand, installed less than 10 years ago...rusted right out

Reyrolle and Ottermill made good gear. OK a bit old but built like tanks and will last forever. Both out of business now but some spares are still available.

I wasn’t too keen on the Ottermill fuse switches at first but even fully loaded they gave no trouble. I did have a 2500A ACB fail but that turned out to be poor maintenance. Took me a while to repair it though, I had to have the parts made.

 

[GLENNSPARK]

If I remember right they were magnetic hydraulic trips, hence the terrible trip curves and reliability.

they are..