Thread: On a scale of "1 to German", how pedantic is this?

Definitely German, what flavour?

Butfering, now part of the Homag group

The Butfering... a lot of good deals in the USA but not down under.

We picked this one up I think 6 years ago in as new condition from a window business that went under for $20k, one third of new price. Apparently he spent too much time keeping everything clean and not enough time making money

I think its beautiful.

The rest of the wiring is pretty tidy too.

Do an image search for "data center cable management", some real works of art there

Speaking as someone who is OCD on the principle of "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well/right", I'd simply say the person who did that takes pride in their work, and it's pleasing to see.

Never mind that my heritage comes from Chermany, so this should be "par for the course"

In another life I built a house for a navy electrician on submarines and he did the electrical on his house, talk about OCD!!!! like the control panel in the photo, every wire was laid straight as a gun barrel, 90 deg bends everywhere and even the printing on the cabling was oriented face up and aligned with its neighbour if there was one. All clips were 200mm apart and every room had its own circuit breaker power and lights!

If it really was German - there would be no labels on anything at all... And a wiring diagram would only be provided upon proof that the Master Electrician in question had been Authorized by The Factory...

I have bought German equipment before...

A funny story....
our company bought some German equipment once upon a time and not knowing the cultural and guild/union laws and differences - the 1st round of equipment came in with NO electrical of hydraulic info what-so-ever... !?!?!?

We halted contracts and thrashed around for a while.... Stipluated that no more equipment would be accepted without approved diagrams and schematics... After a LENGTHY fight over this - the 2nd equipment came in... With schematics and diagrams, etc.... Which appeared at first glance to be for our equipment.. But upon closer inspection didn't actually match anything on our machinery.... Double !?!?!?

More fighting and arguing back and forth - turns out that they are trying to claim the actual schematics and diagrams are proprietary... But we won't pay till we get the right ones... Round and round... Took about a year and we finally got the right paperwork.... But WOW what a fight...

My wife is German. You kind of get used to it after a while.

She came with schematics?

My best friend was a production engineer in Germany for about 20 years, something to do with printing with massive cylinders, embossed paper, things like that.
He said most Germans he knew in the business would generally buy German tools and machinery. Unless they wanted really good ones, in that case they'd buy Swiss.
So your 1 to German scale probably goes to 11

Originally Posted by rwbuild

In another life I built a house for a navy electrician on submarines and he did the electrical on his house, talk about OCD!!!! like the control panel in the photo, every wire was laid straight as a gun barrel, 90 deg bends everywhere and even the printing on the cabling was oriented face up and aligned with its neighbour if there was one. All clips were 200mm apart and every room had its own circuit breaker power and lights!

I mean what else are you gonna do if you're stuck in a submarine, may as well align cables to pass the time

At work in about 2008 we bought a German AUS$1 million plus analytical machine and when the german engineer arrived to install it she (yes she) opened it up to check and install dozens of digital control boards etc, that all had the same level of wiring layout as the OP's picture. I commented on it and she proudly touted the good work done in their factories until I found a label for a couple of boards that said "Made in Poland". I said "What's this?", and she replied, "under cherman supervision of course".

The German machine was replacing a British machine purchased in 1984 and that too had beautifully laid out wiring. Mind you it had to, with 20kV flying around the place you can't have loose or haphazard wiring. That machine was still performing well until it was struck by lightning in 2010 which cooked a number of the electronics boards but the SS vacuum chambers and most of physical components were still fine and were donated to a Canadian University. I managed to keep the HD adjustable feet from the 19" electronics racks which were scrapped.

The sparky at our mens shed does nice layout work and usually uses twice as many cable clamps as a I would - I think he probably knows what the other shedders are like more than I do.