Fought a bad ground on a Citation for hours yesterday

I was working on a Citation 560 in a hangar in Wichita last night. The right nav light was flickering and the radio would cut out on the same side. Ran my continuity checks three times and everything looked fine but it kept acting up. Finally I just pulled the connector apart and saw a tiny bit of corrosion on one pin that I missed the first two looks. Cleaned it with a little contact cleaner and re-seated it, problem went away. Has anyone else spent way too long chasing a ground that was just a dirty pin?

2 comments

2 Comments

rodriguez.felix18d ago

Funny how that works, same thing happens with old car stereos and weird computer issues. The tiniest bit of grime or oxidation can break a circuit that looks perfectly fine to the eye. Always worth hitting the pins with cleaner before you start tearing apart the whole harness.

brooke76717d ago

Actually, continuity checks wouldn't always catch that particular kind of corrosion issue. A meter can show good continuity through a thin layer of oxidation since it uses such low voltage, but once current starts flowing through the real load it creates resistance. I've seen the same trick happen with poorly crimped terminals that test fine with a meter but fail under load.