 Ideal's new Velocity™ |
As Friday Fax #414 predicted, Ideal Industries is rolling out their new Velocity™ Wire Pulling Lubricant. For a good synopsis of their early marketing effort, read their PR release on Thomas Register Online. We've yet to see this new lube (please send some if you can) and therefore cannot comment definitively on its technology, performance, or target market (that comes later). We can, however, comment on their marketing efforts so far. Of primary interest to us is their product flyer's claim of a .26 coefficient of friction (COF) for "Polywater" compared to .19 for Velocity. Uh ... which Polywater? If it's J--and we suspect it is, since Velocity is a me-too cream-colored gel--the number is b.s. They base it on one example combo of THHN cable in EMT conduit, which we have warned the industry for years is a misleading way to portray COF, for the simple facts that THHN and EMT vary by manufacturer, and cables other than THHN are regularly pulled into ducts other than EMT. In fact, THHN and EMT aren't suitable for underground use at all. Lube J has been studied exhaustively by cable manufacturers and engineers the world over. Utilities and contractors by the tens of thousands have used it to install over a quarter million miles of cable. That's enough to get from here to the moon! Folks, one lab test does not trump decades of field experience. APC lists J's COF at .18 for THHN/EMT in the Pull-Planner 2000 after countless lab tests and real-world back-calculations. If that 31% lower COF failed to produce reasonable tension predictions, our Pull-Planner would not have a virtual monopoly on cable-pulling software. J's average COF for typical underground cable/conduit combos is probably more like .13 (that's half of what they claim!). If it was .26, we'd have been out of business a long time ago. Many experienced cable pullers and engineers will see this ploy by Ideal for what it is: snake-oil sales tactics by techno-challenged marketers who simply don't know better. The risk for us is that distributors (who don't pull cable) and smaller contractors (who don't run pulling calcs) may be fooled. Ideal must be forced to provide cable manufacturer approvals and realistic COF studies. We'll have much more to say in the future, but for now your instructions are thus: concede nothing. |
