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Found a trick for tracing intermittent faults on 737s without a wiring diagram

After 4 hours chasing a flickering landing light on a 737NG last Tuesday, I tried clamping my multimeter lead to a long piece of mechanic wire and running it along the bundle to pick up the break by sound, and it worked on the first try, has anyone else used this method on older Airbus models?
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2 Comments
ryang65
ryang652d ago
Man you're gonna fry something doing that. That mechanic wire trick might work in a pinch but you're basically throwing a Hail Mary with the electrical system. Airbuses are way more sensitive to stray voltages than Boeings, especially the older ones with those finicky ECAM displays. I've seen guys try that on an A320 and ended up backfeeding a fault into the FWC, took three days to clear the maintenance messages. If you don't have the wiring diagram, just pull the C/Bs and do a proper wiggle test with a breakout box. That "listen for the break" method sounds fine on a 30 year old 737 but on anything with digital databuses you're asking for a ghost fault that'll come back at the worst time. Stick to the AMM or leave it for the next shift.
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ryan_clark40
What about the load meter reading... nobody checks that first.
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