When fishing a wire for a doorbell recently, I ran into a seemingly impossible situation. I’d drilled the hole for the bell-push, and an angled hole through the wall plate into the proper stud bay from the cellar. But try as I might, I couldn’t get a wire from one to the other. I tried fish tape, a weighted string, bell wire, bead chain, profanity, hooks, probes and a dozen other ploys. I couldn’t find any obstruction, but I couldn’t find the wire either.
As my last attempt before starting to rip clapboards off the side of the housed I made the “fishing rod” shown in the drawing. Starting with a piece of 1/4-in. dowel about a foot long, I drilled a 1/16-in. hole across the diameter about in. from one end. Through this hole I inserted a 15-in. piece of bell wire that I secured with a square knot, leaving the two ends equal.
I then chucked the other end of the dowel in an electric drill. Folding the ends of the wire so they stuck out ahead of the dowel like antennae, I shoved the contraption into the hole in the plate as far as it would go and turned on the drill. At 1,200 rpm, the ends of the wire whipped out centrifugally, lashing around inside the wall and almost immediately entangling the weighted string left dangling from the bell-push hole. When I pulled the drill back through the hole in the plate, I found the string securely wrapped around the dowel.
Robert L. Edsall, New Haven, CT
