While my Dad and brother were here for my daughter's graduation, they were casting about for something to do on an off day (funny/irritating story: My Dad said he wanted to take a Dan Brown tour of locations around DC featured in The Lost Symbol (Robert Langdon, No. 3)
. There didn't appear to be any pre-made tours, so I bought the book from Audible [yes, I know, it was infected with DRM] and listened to it, taking detailed notes about locations in the book. When I was done, I wrote up a pretty-much complete list, sent it to my Dad, and blocked out an unused day for the tour. So when my Dad gets here, I asked him what he wanted to see. He told me he didn't want me to go through all the trouble, and that he only wanted to go on an actual packaged tour. So since we didn't go on the tour, we had an off day.) and I happened to mention that I was planning to splice a power cord with a legitimate 3-pronged plug onto the European plug attached to Terminator 2. My brother scoffed at that, saying we can just pick up a plug a The Home Depot that he can attach in five minutes with just a screwdriver. We did and he did, and it was pretty easy. After they left, I decided to do the same thing to Paragon, because the ground had been cut off by a previous owner and it's been on my list to do for quite some time (and as I've mentioned before my wife and daughter were grounding it themselves for a while until they learned not to reach back while they're watching TV).
Here's the original plug with the ground cut off. You can see that I helpfully label all of my power cords to avoid confusion at the power strip.
I pulled the back off the new plug, which exposes the connectors. This is a really good time to feed the power cord through the back of plug before you attach the wires (I was feeling pretty smug for not forgetting it this time, but when I changed the plug on T2 again I did forget and had to detach the wires). Then I stripped the ends off the wires.
With the back of the plug on the power cord, I attached the wires to the business end of the plug. There's a little gap that you can feed the stripped wire into, then you just tighten the screw to close the gap.
Put everything back together and we're done! Look at that beautiful three-pronged outlet... just look at it.
And as a special bonus...
This was super-easy and fast... so much so that I didn't hesitate to change the plug on T2 for reasons which will be benounced later. Things are moving apace on T2, so I'll have a lot to discuss if I can find the time to blog this weekend.
. There didn't appear to be any pre-made tours, so I bought the book from Audible [yes, I know, it was infected with DRM] and listened to it, taking detailed notes about locations in the book. When I was done, I wrote up a pretty-much complete list, sent it to my Dad, and blocked out an unused day for the tour. So when my Dad gets here, I asked him what he wanted to see. He told me he didn't want me to go through all the trouble, and that he only wanted to go on an actual packaged tour. So since we didn't go on the tour, we had an off day.) and I happened to mention that I was planning to splice a power cord with a legitimate 3-pronged plug onto the European plug attached to Terminator 2. My brother scoffed at that, saying we can just pick up a plug a The Home Depot that he can attach in five minutes with just a screwdriver. We did and he did, and it was pretty easy. After they left, I decided to do the same thing to Paragon, because the ground had been cut off by a previous owner and it's been on my list to do for quite some time (and as I've mentioned before my wife and daughter were grounding it themselves for a while until they learned not to reach back while they're watching TV).Here's the original plug with the ground cut off. You can see that I helpfully label all of my power cords to avoid confusion at the power strip.
So first, I cut the old plug off and teased out the three wires. Since this vintage 70's era plug didn't use the traditional black-white-green wire color scheme, I made note of which identical black wire went to which side of the plug, even though I don't think it makes a huge difference.
I pulled the back off the new plug, which exposes the connectors. This is a really good time to feed the power cord through the back of plug before you attach the wires (I was feeling pretty smug for not forgetting it this time, but when I changed the plug on T2 again I did forget and had to detach the wires). Then I stripped the ends off the wires.
With the back of the plug on the power cord, I attached the wires to the business end of the plug. There's a little gap that you can feed the stripped wire into, then you just tighten the screw to close the gap.
Put everything back together and we're done! Look at that beautiful three-pronged outlet... just look at it.
And as a special bonus...
RARRR!
This was super-easy and fast... so much so that I didn't hesitate to change the plug on T2 for reasons which will be benounced later. Things are moving apace on T2, so I'll have a lot to discuss if I can find the time to blog this weekend.
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