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Went to the Smithsonian Air and Space annex in Chantilly and saw a wiring harness that made me question my whole crimp game
I was out in Virginia for a wedding and had a free morning, so I drove out to the Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles. I spent like two hours just staring at the panel wiring on the Enola Gay and a few other birds, and the thing that got me was how clean and consistent every single termination is. No half-crimped lugs, no wire bundles that look like somebody gave up halfway through, just tight, even runs with service loops that actually make sense. Then I come back to the shop and watch a guy rush a harness on a King Air because the plane is promised out Friday, and the crimps look fine from the outside but I know half of them are junk. So here's the argument I keep having with myself. Do you go slow and treat every harness like it's going in a museum, even if it kills your book time and the boss is breathing down your neck? Or do you accept that production work is production work and a good enough crimp gets the plane flying? I get that we're not building for a display case, but I also can't unsee how those old harnesses held up for decades. Where do you all draw the line between fast and right when nobody's watching?
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drew_chen10d ago
Man, I read a thing from an old Hughes Aircraft harness guy years ago and it stuck with me. He said the reason those old planes lasted is that the crimp spec was written by engineers who knew a bad crimp kills a plane, and the inspectors actually pulled test coupons. They didn't trust their eyes. They cut samples and looked at them under a scope. Half the guys I see rushing today have never once cut a crimp open to see what their tool is actually doing. You don't have to build museum stuff on a King Air, but a pull test and a sample cut take two minutes and tell you the truth. Fast and right aren't enemies if you set up the tool once and stop guessing.
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