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Watching a kid fix his bike chain in Denver made me rethink my whole approach to troubleshooting.

He didn't just look for the obvious broken link, he traced the whole path back to a slightly bent derailleur hanger, which is exactly how I should have diagnosed that flap actuator binding issue on the King Air last month instead of just replacing the motor.
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3 Comments
willow_morgan
Upstream causes" isn't always the answer, sometimes the simple fix is just the right one.
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patricialee
Honestly, used to be all about the quick fix (just swap the part, right?). But seeing that kid's method, and what @gonzalez.reese said about upstream causes, totally flipped it. Last winter my rig's heater kept quitting. I kept replacing fuses. Turns out a worn wire in the dash was shorting, melting them one by one. Chasing the symptom wasted a weekend and three packs of fuses.
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gonzalez.reese
So you're saying the root cause is always upstream?
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