The tilted "roof" of one of these cutouts can be seen on the right. The other two were mounted on the other side of the crossarm. Click "View Original" for more detail. Wood cutouts pretty much became obsolete and unreliable here in the Northeast by 1930 owing to the fact most were weathered from our ever-changing four seasons that caused a lot of them to deteriorate. Porcelain cutouts were introduced right around then (1930) and some utilities group replaced them with porcelain ones for better electric service reliability. Primary cutouts basically were switches with fuses inside of them that provided transformer and circuit overload protection as well as line-circuit switching.