Took me 9 hours to find a faulty cannon plug on a 737 door light

We had this intermittent passenger door light that would flicker only after the plane sat in the sun for a few hours. I replaced the switch first, then the timer, and even swapped the relay on a hunch. Nothing worked. After three days of chasing it, I finally pulled the whole cannon plug apart and found a pin where the crimp had slid halfway out of the socket. It just barely made contact when cold, but once things heated up and expanded, it lost connection. Nine hours total on that one pin, and it took a brand new apprentice to spot it while I was ready to rewire the whole door. Anyone else have a fix that ended up being way simpler than the effort you put in, or was it just my weekend?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_sage2d agoMost Upvoted

man that hurts to read because I've been there too. spent a whole shift chasing a flicker on our walk-in freezer light, replaced the bulb, the ballast, even the damn door switch, turns out it was a loose ground wire someone had stuffed behind the panel. my apprentice found it in like five minutes while I was about to rip out the whole ceiling.

wren30116m ago

Man, that's brutal. Sometimes the simplest thing hides right in front of you after you've torn everything else apart.