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Vent: I chased connector pin problems with a Fluke 87 for 6 years before a $40 wiggle test box showed me what I was missing
Back at the shop in Tulsa I used to sit there for an hour at a time measuring pins one by one with my meter, and half the time the fault would hide the second I moved my probes. Last Tuesday a new guy handed me his homemade breakout box with a bunch of switches and jacks, and we found a bad crimp in a cannon plug in about 4 minutes just by wiggling the harness under load. How many of you still do the pin by pin dance, or has everyone moved to loading the circuit while you shake it?
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brianm2715d ago
Wiggling under load is the only way I diagnose anything now. Static pin checks lie to you all day long because the fault only shows up when current is actually flowing through the connection. A meter with no load can't tell you about a crimp that's barely touching, it just reads fine and wastes your whole morning. That breakout box lets you load every circuit at once and shake the whole harness, so the bad spot shows itself in seconds instead of hours. I spent way too many years trusting my Fluke like it was the final word on every problem. Buy or build the box, it pays for itself the first time you find a gremlin in ten minutes.
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