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Rant: I called the 'run a spare wire while the panel is open' advice a waste of time until a CJ4 job in Wichita bit me
For a long time I rolled my eyes at the old guys who kept saying to pull a spare wire any time you have an avionics bay or panel open. I figured it was just busy work and extra weight, and I skipped it on plenty of jobs. Then last spring I was doing a Garmin upgrade on a CJ4 in Wichita and the owner came back two weeks later wanting a second comm and an extra audio panel input. The whole harness had to come apart again, and I ate about 9 hours of rework that I never billed for. I sat there with the panel on the floor wondering why I did not just run two spare 22 gauge wires and a bit of lacing cord while I was already in there. It costs you maybe 20 minutes on the front end and it has saved me twice since, once on a King Air 200 and once on a 206. So I was wrong about that one, the old timers were right and I was just being stubborn. Anybody else got a shortcut they used to blow off that turned out to actually pay off?
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shanegibson22d ago
It costs you maybe 20 minutes on the front end" is the part I can't get behind. Twenty minutes if the bundle is already exposed and you're just adding to it. But half the planes I work on have tight runs behind the panel where fishing a spare means pulling half the avionics stack anyway, and now I've got dead wire sitting there adding weight and a future mystery for the next guy. I've also seen spares get tied into the wrong bundle and chafe against a connector shell for 800 hours. I'll run a spare when I know a panel swap is coming, otherwise I leave it out.
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