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Showerthought: I wasted 2 hours on a fuel gauge fault because I skipped the simplest check first
Last Tuesday I was in hangar 4 at KAPA chasing a dead fuel gauge on a King Air 200 and I had the panel half apart before my lead, Dave, asked if I checked the sending unit ground. Sure enough, the ground strap on the wing root was corroded and reading 40 ohms when it should've been under 1, and I'd been staring at wiring diagrams like an idiot instead of grabbing a multimeter and checking the easy stuff first. The part cost $12 and the fix took 20 minutes once I stopped overthinking it. How many of you have done the same thing and gone straight to the hard stuff before checking grounds and connections?
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hunt.leo9d ago
Dave got lucky with that call. Half the time a dead gauge on a King Air is the sender itself or a bad wire in the wing, and you'd have spent those same 2 hours on grounds before finding the real issue. Pulling the panel first isn't dumb either, it lets you see the whole circuit instead of guessing at one strap. The 40 ohms was a good catch, but chasing diagrams isn't wasted time, it's how you learn the system so the next one takes 10 minutes.
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