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Realized how much airframe wiring diagrams have changed since I started
I was digging through an old service manual from 1995 last night, trying to trace a ground fault on a King radio install. It hit me that those diagrams used to be all hand drawn with these thick lines and no color coding at all. We had to guess which wire was which based on dashed versus dotted patterns. These kids today with their PDFs and tablet schematics don't know how good they have it. Has anyone else run into an old manual that made you stop and think about how far we've come?
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derek_burns19d ago
Man those old hand drawn diagrams were something else. I remember back in the late 90s we had a manual for a Cessna 172 that had a wiring diagram that looked like someone traced it with a crayon over a photocopy. What saved me more times than I can count was taking a highlighter and marking every wire as I traced it on the actual schematic. Old school but it really helped me keep track of which line was which when the dashes and dots all blurred together after about 20 minutes. Also found out the hard way that those old manuals sometimes had mistakes in them where a wire would just disappear off the edge of the page. You just had to flip back and forth between three different pages to figure out where it went. Makes you appreciate how clean these PDFs are with search functions and zoom.
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