Lab and polymer plant cable in Akron

Rubber, polymer and compounding

Goodyear is here, Bridgestone runs technical and race-tyre work here, and around them sit polymer research, compounding and plastics machinery, with coatings filling out the older blocks. The city's identity and its payroll both come from the same chemistry.

Two cable streams come out of that. A compounding plant generates power and control cable at industrial scale, on trays and in ducts, replaced on condition. A test floor generates small, specific, heavily labelled cable that was never designed to travel and often does not survive being coiled badly. Both streams end up in the same store room, which is where the sorting usually has to happen.

The test floor's short lengths

Test work runs on instrumentation: thermocouples, low-count twisted pairs, load cell and strain leads, drive cable to a test drum. A run might be thirty feet and a drum might sit on a bench. It comes off a rig coiled and taped with a channel number on a flag, and the flag is usually the only record.

This is the material most often thrown out and most often worth a second look. The conductor is fine-stranded copper, the shield is frequently braid rather than foil, and the small quantities add up across a lab that is rearranged every few years.

Multi-storey buildings from the canal era

A good part of Akron's industrial floor space is vertical, built when the canal carried freight and a factory went up rather than out. I-76 and I-77 pass close and CSX and Norfolk Southern serve the same blocks, but the building itself may have no dock and a freight elevator with a posted capacity that everyone ignores until something heavy arrives.

Cable leaves those buildings through the elevator or a window hoist, and either one sets the size of a load far more than the truck does. A drum that will not fit the cage is a drum that gets rewound on the floor.

Exposure in a compounding plant

Process areas carry oil, carbon black and solvent, and a jacket that has lived in that air is not the same as one that sat in a warehouse. Wipe a section before photographing it, because the honest colour of the jacket is under the film, and a reviewer reading a photograph of a black-smeared cable cannot tell a stain from a crack. The print on a compounding plant reel is unreadable for the same reason, so a wiped section in good light beats a whole drum in shadow.