Skeptical of those all-in-one testers until my third A320 snag

I always thought the integrated card testers were a gimmick until last month when I had a weird intermittent comm fault on an A320 that took three shifts to trace. That little box pointed me to a bad LRU pin in 10 minutes. Anyone else had luck with those or am I just lucky so far?

2 comments

2 Comments

emeryr3811d ago

Yeah but were you getting any fault codes in the CFDS before you broke out the tester? I had a similar thing on a 737 MAX where the integrated box caught a pinched wire in the connector that the system tests kept passing. The all-in-one stuff is cool but only if you know what you're looking for. Otherwise you get a clean reading and chase ghosts for days. Which brand were you using anyway?

patricia_chen6711d ago

funny you mention that @emeryr38, because my buddy had almost the same exact issue on a 757 a few months back. he was chasing a weird intermittent fault in the pressurization system and the box showed zero codes. spent two days swapping sensors and checking grounds before he finally took the connector apart. found a broken pin terminal that was making contact like 80% of the time but would drop out under vibration. the all-in-one tester just saw a good circuit every time he ran it cause the pin was seated right when he plugged it in. he was using a topmatic tester and swears by it now for connector work but says you still gotta trust your gut over the machine sometimes. sometimes the old eyeballs and a magnifying glass beat any fancy tester.