Cable Tracker

One of the more troublesome aspects of aviation electrical work is the
fact our wires are usually NOT color-coded. That means you can have a
bundle of twenty wires and before you can do any useful work you will
need to figure out which one of the twenty at the equipment rack is
the frayed one you've spotted behind the instrument panel.

How to do it? The good ol' fashioned way, which I described in an
article some time ago, is to use a continuity tester. That is, a
hunka wire long enough to run from here to there, a couple of
flashlight batteries, and a flashlight bulb. You know you've found
the correct lead when the bulb lights up. I even described a do-it-
yourself tester based on an old-style Navy flashlight.

Alas, while 3 volts ain't all that much, that's what you are
connecting to your wires when you use a continuity-check as I
described in my article. If you're dealing with a real mess, such as
a bundle of wires that have been chopped with an ax (!) ...you could
be connecting those 'unimportant' three volts to a meter-circuit that
blows it's top at two volts.

Whatcha REALLY want is a cable tracker.

A cable track is a little oscillator that puts a warbling TONE on the
wire under test, which you can then 'hear' by waving a matching
receiver at the other end of the wire.

Harbor Freight's gottem. Item #94181 about $20 US, probably less if
you can find a Sale. (But Santa brought me this one :-) I'll
probably do a little write-up, put it on my blog so you can see what
it looks like. But not this year.

Was it a good year? Of course it was; they're all good years. Some
are just better than others.

Time for my Ten O'Clock pills. I'll see you guys next year.

-R.S.Hoover