A Shop-Vac, a labyrinth, and coax cable: It’s MacGyver time!

Your assignment: Lay fiber between an office and a warehouse standing 350 feet apart. You have a Shop-Vac, a ball of kite string, and a baggie. Do you accept this challenge?

It may sound like the plot from an episode of “MacGyver,” but these were the exact elements a colleague and I had on a hand for a networking job back in the day. Somehow, we made it all work, I’m glad to report.

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As the networking world has grown, the ability to transmit data on local networks has also increased. But when I started in IT over 20 years ago, most of our systems were 10Base2 (coax). We were able to make them work because we didn’t have the proliferation of devices that required network connectivity that we do today.

The company I worked for was growing rapidly, and its tech needs grew along with it. I survived the joy of crawling through attic spaces and shoving Cat5 through small openings above suspended ceilings in most of our locations. Of course, this running of new wire required new network cards that we tried to couple with PC upgrades. The Cat5 upgrades permitted us to increase the office footprint and attach more devices to the network.

Things were going smoothly, and our department was known for its ability to get the job done. But we ran into a challenge when the company decided to purchase a new facility in a New England state. Moving office locations is a headache for the IT department even in a best-case scenario. But too often owners don’t find it necessary to consult an IT person about a new location until after the deal has been struck. Such was the case here.

You gotta tear it down to build it up

Luckily, our business needed railroad access, and before we could move into the building a rail spur had to be laid. The requirements for this modification to an existing railroad would be time-consuming, which gave us a much larger-than-expected window, making all of us in the IT department very happy.

It was a good thing, too, because there was a lot of work to be done. When we first inspected the new location, it had been vacant for five or six years. Before that, several tenants had occupied the space and adapted it to their needs. It was a mess, the ceilings and walls crowded with multiple phone systems, several types of networks, and security alarms. Fortunately, we were given lots of latitude, and with no one looking over our shoulder, we gutted the ceilings and ran all new Cat5 and phone lines.

But wait, there’s more

Things were going well until upper management dropped a bomb on us: It wanted us to not only get the new location ready to go, but it wanted us to set up several PCs and a networked time clock in a remote warehouse. The fleet manager was to be deployed there, to print bills of lading and to receive goods from that building.

I took a trip to the location and measured off the distance from the office building to the warehouse. The structures stood 350 feet apart, not including the distance the wire would travel inside the buildings. Back then our budget would not support a wireless data transmission system that could handle our projected load. Fiber appeared to be our only solution.

We still had the contact information of the building’s prior owner, who said not to worry because he had buried conduit between the facilities. He claimed he was a building contractor and planned ahead for such scenarios. I felt a bit relieved and made an appointment to meet him at the location the next week.

The day arrived, and my co-worker and I drove the seven hours to the location. We walked the grounds as the previous owner showed us the serpentine route he had used to lay the conduit. It added about another 50 feet to the run, and he had never placed a pull rope inside the conduit. Our jaws almost dropped as he told us not to worry and use a “fish tape” and snake it through. As he drove off, my partner expressed my thoughts exactly when he noted that the longest fish tape we knew of was only 240 feet, and this conduit run had several T’s and Y’s to other buildings.

The action plan takes shape

Knowing that we were expected to make this work and having a great deal of pride in our ability to solve any problem, we mapped out the conduit runs on a piece of paper and began brainstorming. The conduits already contained several cables. Some were power, and some were 25-pair phone lines. Digging was out of the question, so we came up with a Plan B.

Because most of the conduits were open on the end, we went to the local building supply store and purchased caps for all of them. We also purchased the largest Shop-Vac available, along with a ball of kite string.

Back at the location, we drilled holes in the caps to match the existing cables, sawed the caps in half so we could install them, and sealed them around the cables.

We then addressed the two ends through which we needed to pass cables. We modified a cap to seal off the “entrance” side to about one half its normal size, then performed a similar operation to the “exit” end to permit the vacuum to be attached. We were ready to test our theory.

I blew a small amount of air into a baggie, tied the string to it, and lowered it into the conduit. We both had walkie-talkies, and I gave my coworker the signal to start the vacuum. However, the string spun off the spool so fast it actually cut through the conduit. I was afraid it would catch fire and so told my coworker to shut off the vacuum, which he immediately did. I was thinking through our next move, but we were in for a surprise. When my coworker opened the vacuum, he discovered he had the baggie and about 50 feet of string. Both of us gave a whoop for joy.

We now had a kite string, which was a key element but only a very small part of the battle. We spent the rest of the day attaching a thin pull rope to the kite string and manually pulling it through the pipes. Once that was completed, we used it to pull a half-inch rope though. Our arms were aching by day’s end, but at least we had laid the foundation to complete the job the next day. The only problem: As hard as it had been to pass the pull rope through, our next step was to pull a 25-pair phone line and an outdoor jacketed fiber cable.

The following day we set up the spools of cable to feed through the conduit and connected them to the pull rope with two cable puller sleeves. We added two quarts of conduit lubricant where the cable started into the conduit. On the other end, we stationed a scissor lift as close to the conduit as possible. This permitted us to take an eight-foot pull with each “lift” of the scissor jack. It was an arduous job, but we got it done.

Our department also completed our preparations to the new facility ahead of schedule, meaning we still had an unblemished record for jobs completed. In spite of all the work involved or frustrations along the way, when things come together, it just felt great — and experiences like this give you something to think about when current work challenges seem overwhelming.

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This story, “A Shop-Vac, a labyrinth, and coax cable: It’s MacGyver time!,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more crazy-but-true stories in the anonymous Off the Record blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.