Carl D wrote on Jun 27
th, 2021 at 10:30am:
The attached picture is the electrical box of lane 3 shortly after I started working in the abovementioned tenpin bowling centre in July 1988. All 24 were pretty much the same.
The centre opened in November 1962 and you can see the results of over 25 years of 'dodgy' wiring repairs at the time (love the safety pin on the motor contactor).

The 3 phase input is on the left side of the box, transformer on the right.
All 24 boxes were cleaned up and rewired by a local electrician a few months after that picture was taken mainly because the old guy who did all the electrical work was retiring and no-one else could make head or tail of the wiring (every box was different in some way).
Looks nasty, but if you have opened any heavy machine electrical boxes, they mostly look pretty much like that when you get into them.
Especially the older ones.
Wiring for Lathes, Milling machines, shapers, mills, basically any heavy machinery is difficult.
There isnt a nice clean place to run wires and they tend to be placed wherever they can fit.
Older machines, Like the ones I worked on, had some seriously old style relays and even has wrapped wiring (those who know what I mean will understand).
They also suffer badly from heat, fluid ingress and sometimes overheating due to hard use.
One particular Russian made rolling mill was so bad we had to rewire it from front to back.
They only used two colours and sometimes it was very hard to work out what went where.
Took us a week, but afterward the operator said it had never worked as well.
People today are used to seeing nice pretty organised Computer style wiring (well neater than old control boxes).
Messy control boxes tend to frighten them a bit.
When operating, old mechanical relays spark and flash sometimes, that gets some of the less experienced ones jumping.
I've been working on this shite for over 40 years.
I have seen some of the most dangerous things you can imagine.
One 500 mm segmented wheel horizontal grinder start switch had been smashed.
I found them using bare wires to start up the grinder by intermittently touching the wires to each other until it got up to speed.
Linking them straight up would blow the fuse.
Then they simply hooked the wires around each other to keep it running.
It was three phase 415 for goodness sake.