Hit 500 wire terminations without a single rework yesterday

I've been doing avionics bench work for about 4 years now, mostly on GA stuff like Garmin panels and old King radios. Yesterday I finished up a really messy Cessna 182 panel pull and had to re-terminate like 50+ wires for the new stack. I kept a tally on my whiteboard out of curiosity and hit exactly 503 D-sub pins and ring terminals before lunch. Not a single one had to be cut back and redone. That felt huge, because I remember my first year where I'd screw up maybe 1 out of every 20 pins. It made me realize how much the feel for crimper pressure and wire strip length just becomes muscle memory after a while. Has anyone else tracked their own rework rate and noticed a big drop after a certain point?

2 comments

2 Comments

wren30121d ago

What kind of crimper are you running, because I swear the tool makes or breaks consistency more than people want to admit. I switched from a cheap ratcheting one to a Daniels M22520 and my failure rate dropped from like 5% to almost nothing inside a month. Did you notice a similar jump when you upgraded gear, or was it strictly reps that got you there?

faith_smith21d ago

Oh man, that tool thing is huge. A buddy of mine, he was building a bunch of custom sensor harnesses for his car project and kept getting bad connections. He had this old generic crimper from a hardware store, and he was pulling his hair out replacing pins. Finally a guy at the shop let him borrow his calibrated Daniels M22520 for a weekend. My friend said it was night and day, like the first crimp he did with it looked textbook perfect compared to the mangled mess he was used to. His failure rate went from every few connectors to maybe one in a hundred. He went out and bought his own the next week.