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Showerthought: I used to ring out every wire by hand, now I let the box do it and I feel weird about it
When I started out on the flight line at a regional outfit near Wichita, every continuity check meant a meter, two probes, and my own eyeballs on every single pin. I would sit there for an hour on a 60 pin cannon plug, beeping pin to pin, writing numbers in a spiral notebook because I did not trust myself to remember. Last month we picked up a bond meter with a built in auto sequencer, and it walked a 120 pin harness in about 9 minutes and printed a pass or fail for each one. I get that it is faster and it does not get tired at hour 11 of a shift, but part of me misses knowing the harness by feel, because you learn where the chafing hides when you trace it with your own hands. The kicker is I caught one intermittent that the auto tester flagged as a pass three separate times, and it turned out to be a loose backshell ground, so the machine is not magic either. Curious if anyone here runs both ways, or if you have gone full auto and never looked back.
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rowan72518d ago
The part about learning where the chafing hides with your own hands got me. I used to say the same thing, that hand ringing was the only way to really know a harness. Then I watched a guy chase a bad crimp for two shifts that a sequencer would have caught in the first pass, and I changed my mind. You still catch stuff the box misses, like that loose backshell ground, so running both ways seems right to me.
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