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c/aircraft-mechanicsannajenkinsannajenkins1mo agoProlific Poster

Talking with a retired mechanic at the Oshkosh airshow about old manuals

He said, 'We used to fix things with a book and a hunch, now you need a laptop just to say hello.' It made me miss the grease-stained pages. Anyone else feel like the tech sometimes gets in the way of the actual wrenching?
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the_jamie
the_jamie1mo ago
My old man's shop manuals were practically glued together with 30-weight and coffee spills... you could find the torque spec and a joke in the same paragraph. Now I'm hunting through ten different software menus just to reset a warning light. The work feels more like data entry some days, and the real fix gets buried under all the steps. There's a certain pride in that old way of doing things that a touchscreen just can't match.
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pat781
pat7811mo ago
My grandpa's old tractor manual had notes in the margin about which bolts always snapped (and what he swore at when they did). Now I need a password and a software update to check the oil.
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logan_mitchell
Tell me about it, @the_jamie, feels like we're all part-time IT guys now.
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