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Noticed a big shift in how new guys treat safety wire pliers over the last 5 years
Back when I started at a little shop in Fort Worth, the older mechanics would hand me a pair of safety wire pliers and show me how to twist by feel (you know, that little snap when it's tight enough). Now I see a lot of the younger guys coming in with their own fancy $80 pliers from online stores, but they skip the basic steps. They might get the wire twisted fast, but I've seen three instances just this year where the safety wire came loose during inspection because they didn't double-check the tension before trimming. It's like the tool became more important than the technique, and that shift happened around the time those high-end brands started flooding the internet with ads. Even the cheap sets we used to buy from the tool truck lasted longer because we knew how to use them right. Has anyone else noticed this kind of thing at their hangar?
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fisher.taylor16d ago
Yeah but that 22 year old kid probably had someone show him how to set up that fancy tool right before he used it. The problem isn't the new pliers themselves, they're good tools. It's that without learning the basics first, when those carbide inserts wear down or the self adjusting mechanism gets gunked up nobody knows how to work around it. I've seen guys toss a $80 pair of pliers in the trash because a spring broke, something a set of $20 pliers could be fixed with a zip tie in five minutes. You still need to know how to feel that tension by hand, the tool is just a helper.
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Hold up, let me disagree with you there. I've been supervising at a midsize repair station and honestly those young guys with their fancy $80 pliers are doing better work than the old timers ever did. The cheap ones from the tool truck always had slipping jaws and uneven tension so you had to muscle through every twist. Those new pliers with the carbide inserts and the self adjusting tension let them focus on getting the wire route perfect instead of fighting the tool. Saw a 22 year old kid nail a perfect pattern on a turbine exhaust last week with zero redo's, something I watched old heads screw up twice a shift. The tool doing part of the work isn't a bad thing if the result is better wire.
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