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Old inspector's two word rule about wire chafing stuck with me for 8 years
I was fresh out of school at a MRO shop in Tulsa and this FAA inspector watched me route a bundle near a clamp, then just said 'reseat it' without looking up. He explained later that if the wire touches anything metal within an inch of that clamp, it's already chafing on paper, so he makes everyone redo it once to build the habit. Do any of you have a quick phrase or rule from a senior tech that makes you second-guess every install you do now?
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skyler_fox7223d ago
An inch of clearance from every clamp sounds like overkill when half the fleet is flying with way tighter routing than that. Seems like the kind of rule that just makes you redo work that was already fine.
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mason.keith23d ago
Man, I've been that guy who had to redo a whole bundle because I skipped a clamp by a hair, so I feel this one in my bones. Here's the thing though... an inspector telling you to "reseat it" once when you're green is cheap. Finding a rubbed spot on a fuel pump wire at 30,000 feet is not cheap, and neither is the paperwork after. I've seen routing so tight it looked like the last guy used a come-along to pull it in, and sure, some of those planes are still flying, but that doesn't make it right, it just means they haven't gotten caught yet. The old timers didn't hand down those little sayings to mess with us, they handed them down because somebody before them learned it the hard way.
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