When did they let the amateurs in?

The forward umbilical connector (MTS test cable) had 112 pins, and was aptly named 'Breakaway Cable' - at least two wires would break about three feet from the missile end every time a missile was fired and sometimes when it wasn't.

The broken cables were usually given to WOII Bennett and me in the Ground Guidance Test Station. I could never puzzle out why we had this job when WOII Saunders in the Missile Guidance Test Station was skiving off somewhere. I found out late in my army career that Saunders, for whom almost nobody had any respect at all, dodged the bullet by claiming that he was color-blind. The odd thing about that is that we were all given color-blindness tests before being allowed into the electronics trade, for obvious reasons.

Of the 112 wires, two in the center were size 0 high-current power cables, six were size 10 low-power and the remainder size 14 signal wires. The coding was achieved by a combination of seven basic background colors and two colored stripes, and there were only two spares.

Repairing a cable usually took the two of us about two days, starting with continuity-testing all the pins before dismantling the connector and stripping the outer insulation back three or four feet and trying to locate the break by sticking sewing pins through the insulation. If we were lucky we got the right end first time.

At first we tried butt-splicing the broken wire, but were informed with great sincerity that this was unacceptable after a cable we had repaired was inspected at 35 Base Wksps. So the only other choice was to make a list of all the wires, cut the end below the break, un-solder and re-solder all the contacts, including military-style rubber insulation boots, and re-assemble.

The very first time we tried this we thought we could simplify things by allocating numbers to the colors like resistor charts. This worked well for about an hour until we realized that the blue and green colors had light and dark variations, and we had to start over. Then we found out that all the colors had light and dark variations. To make it even more difficult, the list for one cable wouldn't work on the next one.

Despite the fact that Bennett and I had both been informed by the medics that we were among the six percent of males with perfect color vision, we frequently got color-confused and had to take a break. Sometimes you would come across a bunch of wires with a reverse twist, indicating that you had to re-check the last few wires in reverse order in case you hadn't spotted it early enough.

On one trip to Benbecula we arrived to find that there were no working cables on hand, and Bennett and I repaired two each before we could do anything else. The thing I remember most clearly about that episode was the sticky waterproofing preservative we found gucking up the inside of the end connectors, which we tried to dig out and clean off with various solvents, including petrol, to no avail. The only thing to hand that worked was carbon-tetrachloride, which was applied in copious quantities despite the headaches and bouts of wheezing.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration would love to hear about that!