benc53•5mo ago

Hit 500 harness repairs last month and it hit me hard

I crossed 500 repairs on avionics harnesses last month, which is a lot for a guy who only works at a small shop in Tucson. I keep a log book (yeah, I'm that guy) and it was wild flipping through all the work from two years ago to now. Most of them were for Cessna 152s and 172s, which surprised me since those are supposed to be simple birds. Has anyone else tracked their repair count and found a number that caught them off guard?

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3 Comments

betty_price145mo ago

Wow, that's a LOT of overthinking about some simple harness repairs.

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hugo_bennett5mo ago

Duggan's Avionics in Phoenix hit 600 last year on their 172 harnesses alone. But here's my thing - counting the repairs doesn't tell the full story. Those 152s and 172s that surprised you, they're flying in a desert environment that bakes the insulation brittle after about 1500 hours. You're counting fixes but not the root cause. I'd bet half of yours are cracked insulation near the firewall where the real heat lives. The numbers look impressive until you realize you're patching the same failure points over and over instead of changing the wire routing or adding heat shielding. Flipping through that log book might show a pattern worth chasing.

4

michaelchen5mo ago

Nailed it, that firewall area is basically an oven for those wires. I’ve seen the same thing on our fleet’s 172s where the harness near the exhaust tunnel looks fine until you bend it and the insulation just flakes off. Really drives home that a repair count can hide how often you’re just treating the symptom instead of the real problem.

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