Hot take: New tech is great but you still need to know the old torque specs

I keep seeing guys just trust the digital wrench readout and skip the manual check. It matters because a stripped bolt on a flap track is a real bad day. How many of you still keep the old paper manuals around?

2 comments

2 Comments

jakem9825d ago

Watch a guy trust a digital readout over the manual once and you'll never skip it. Saw a tech almost send a plane out with a loose panel because his fancy wrench was out of calibration. My old paper manual has more coffee stains than pages but the torque specs don't lie. That thing saved my butt last week on a landing gear bolt.

emma_mitchell25d ago

Coffee stains on the manual... that reminds me of the old wiring diagrams we used. The pages were so worn from grease and coffee you could barely see the lines. But you knew if a diagram had that many stains, a dozen guys before you had fixed the same problem with it. New guys would pull up the digital version and miss the handwritten note in the margin about the bad splice. The dirtiest pages were always the right ones.