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I was a fiber installer once upon a time in the 00s. A guy I worked with who was "the splicer" for our team and has years of experience using the little easy bake oven thing swore by going off the smell to know when it's "ready". Probably not the greatest thing for your health considering he did at least 10-12 of these a day.

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The old manual tools were extremely slow. Modern fibre splicers mean that a dozen fibres can be spliced in maybe a bit more half an hour, although cable prep cam take a significant amount of time depending on the cable type, number of cables and splice closure. Even more if you're using a ribbon splicer that fuses 12 fibres per burn.

Modern fiber splicers are fully automatic, so you don't need to smell :-) The only thing that's still mostly by hand is the cutting (mostly stripping away the various layers of insulation).

Modern fusion splicers are also shockingly cheap. You can get one for under $600.

Yup, I have one from AliExpress :-) Only done ~50 splices or so, though, but works really well.

Plus tariff.

Under $600 delivered from Amazon, e.g. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D6R91Y8F

Even 20 years ago when i was learning they were automatic.

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