# Old wood insulators.



## just the cowboy (Sep 4, 2013)

Went for a hike in old dust bowl area and came across these. Old poles with two wires, only about # 10 wire. Poles ran for miles so I guess it was old phone lines.


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## wcord (Jan 23, 2011)

Someone climbed up to get the glass insulators.


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## just the cowboy (Sep 4, 2013)

wcord said:


> Someone climbed up to get the glass insulators.


If they did they hit every pole for miles in the middle of nowhere in a place called Purgatory. If you look at the ends they are grooved/threaded as if it was for wrapping the wire around.


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## SWDweller (Dec 9, 2020)

No the groves in the wood was for the glass insulators to be screwed on.

You can see the threads inside the insulators here.

Wood gets wet and it looses some of its insulating properties.

There is a control scheme similar to this in Kingman Arizona. They used 480v ac over several miles as the switching mechanism. They had tried radio control and it did not work in all weather conditions. Weird the only switch legs like this I have ever seen in 50 years in the trade.


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## Wirenuting (Sep 12, 2010)

They have a nice value to them.


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## Signal1 (Feb 10, 2016)

Telegraph


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## Kevin (Feb 14, 2017)

We have one of those wooden holders for the glass insulators at my dad's place. It's been indoors its whole life so it's in pretty good condition.


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## wiz1997 (Mar 30, 2021)

just the cowboy said:


> If they did they hit every pole for miles in the middle of nowhere in a place called Purgatory. If you look at the ends they are grooved/threaded as if it was for wrapping the wire around.


If you're going to pull the wires down you might as well take the insulators while your at it.

The insulators were reusable.

The previous owner of my house was a lineman and a collector of glass insulators.

His man cave (12'x14' room) had hundreds of glass insulators, all kinds of colors and manufactures.

I found a few on, what were once homesteads, that became the Big Thicket National Forest.

As Scouts, we would get old maps from the 20's and 30's, and look for old homesteads.

Then go out in the woods and locate the remains of the house, then start a search pattern for the dump the homesteaders dug.

Dug up hundreds of old glass bottles.

Old brown Clorox bottles, medicine bottles, and liquor bottles.

So how do you find an old homestead.

We learned to look for plants that were not native to Texas.

Looked for wisteria trees, which are not native to Texas.

The purple color stood out like a sore thumb in the piney woods.

The story we got was the homesteader's wife wanted to look out the kitchen window at something other than brown bark trees.

Made sense.


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## canbug (Dec 31, 2015)

I put some up in the front yard.









Tim


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## micromind (Aug 11, 2007)

It's possible that the old glass insulators were not carefully removed and placed in a felt-lined wooden box but rather were shot off by some sort of a ruthless young vandal..........


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## radio208 (Aug 27, 2014)




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## JRaef (Mar 23, 2009)

When I was a kid, my friends and I used to do long bicycle treks out in the boondocks to look for glass insulators that were either still on the poles or on the ground after the wood had rotted out. If they were up on the poles still, one of us would shinny up the pole, unwrap the wires and wrap them back onto the wood. It wasn't until I became an electrician years later that I found out that they were potentially high (to us) voltage. We just assumed they were old telegraph lines and something like 24VDC.

We would sell the insulators at the local Flea Market. At first we would just sell them for $2 each, then we started seeing that other people that bought them from us were selling them for a lot more! After that we put high prices on them then said "or best offer". The most we got for one was $100, which in the late 60s was a LOT of money to a bunch of 10 year-olds. That bought a LOT of Playboys and Tiparillos...


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