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Used to chase every wire by hand, now I let the bonding meter do the talking on a Falcon 2000
I used to spend 45 minutes per connector checking shield grounds with a Fluke 1587 and a homemade jumper, and I'd still miss one every few jobs. Now I clip a bonding meter across the backshell and watch the resistance live while I torque, and a full tail cone check that used to eat my whole Tuesday takes about 90 minutes. Found a 0.4 ohm outlier on a static wick last week at the hangar in Wichita that I know I would have signed off as fine two years ago. The old way wasn't lazy, it was just blind to anything under 2 ohms unless I chased every single path by hand. Anyone else switch to a live meter setup and start catching stuff they used to miss?
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the_mary9d ago
Going live changes how you think about the whole check, not just the speed part. With the old Fluke and jumper setup you were basically guessing at the circuit, so you'd get a number and move on. Watching the needle while you torque means you catch the bad ones mid-turn, like when a lug seats and the reading suddenly jumps from 0.3 to 1.1, that tells you the crimp is loose before the clamp is even tight. That 0.4 ohm static wick you found is a perfect example, because a wick that's barely hanging on can still flow enough to pass a go/no-go test at 2 ohms. Once you see how much lives down in that 0 to 1 ohm range you stop trusting pass/fail on anything. Might be worth logging your outliers for a month, you'll probably find the same spots on the Falcon keep showing up.
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