I was casting doubt on the quality of an electrical installation today, when I enquired where the main fuse is the lady customer told me that it’s in an inaccessible location, adding “I think it’s a Whitworth fuse”.
All of the machinary I worked with during my 26 years employment was either BSF or BSW. Forging presses, drop stamps, old Vaughn 10 ton overhead cranes on bare copper trolley wires, Pangbourne shotblast machines, the lot!
I remember the company got some kind of grant from the Govt of the day to buy metric tools for the lads when we went metric. We - the lads - never saw a bean out of it, so where the money went I've no idea. As for test kit, I was issued with a BC lampholder, a 15w pigmy lamp and a foot of twin twisted bell wire - Tha'll be reet with that lad' as the gaffer sent me off to fault find on a 3 phase 440v Butler horizontal planing m/c!
perhaps at some point the 1/2 BSW fuse should be updated to the nearest metric equivalent, the offcut of M12 studding...
In the early 2000s I was involved in the development of some telecom kit that was to be taken around to various trade shows and similar, and we tried to to make things smooth-ish for the unfortunate installing team by sending out the right kit to do the hook ups with them. The containers often cleared customs on the Saturday before the show opened on Monday, so they were very much under pressure anyway, and had no time to nip off to the wholesalers for a local connector. In Europe there was fair agreement on 400V 3 phase and BS4343 type red connectors, with occasional reversals of rotation, and the odd N-L3 swap, so we got lulled by this into what turned out to be a false sense of security.
Then going further afield it went a bit downhill, and it stopped being sockets
In Russia the supply came as a 4 core cable ending beside the container with 3 of the ends taped and one bare (As feared this was L1, L2 L3 and N or E (who knows ) was the bare one, already live - pity it was raining..)
The prep info for a far eastern country had us puzzled however, and when the answer to the questionaire via the agents was eventually correctly translated, the advice was 'our preferred 3 phase connector is the M6 wingnut.' ..
Being close to Bromsgrove a lot of guys in Redditch were also very quick to tell you they had a set of Garringtons spanners in their tool kit along with the spanners for their bikes.
When I was a kid I found it odd that the thin lightweight punched steel and multi sized bicycle spanners made to keep in your saddle bag actually fitted your bike better than Dad’s set of “proper spanners” until someone explained why.
