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The day I figured out I'd been crimping D-sub pins backwards for 2 years
I was working a line job in Nashville back in 2018, swapping out a comm panel on a King Air 200. This old-timer named Chuck walked by, watched me for about 30 seconds, and goes "son, your pins are facing the wrong way." I told him I'd been doing it this way since school and never had issues. He pulled one of my crimped pins, held it up, and showed me how the little locking tab was pointing away from the plastic housing instead of catching inside it. I pulled 12 more from a harness I'd finished the day before and half of them came out with barely any effort. That whole time I had been relying on friction and luck instead of the actual lock, and not a single inspector ever caught it. Has anyone else had one of those moments where a simple physical thing finally clicked after years of doing it wrong?
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jamief671mo ago
Guess you were living on borrowed time and friction.
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reese_hayes711mo ago
Wait, isn't friction exactly what keeps things from falling apart though @jamief67? Like take a car engine, too little friction and the pistons seize up, too much and you overheat but you need some to even move. Borrowed time is just how everything works really, everything wears out eventually. Friction is what lets you control when and how that happens, not just something that burns you up. If you had zero friction you'd slide right off the road and that's borrowed time with no brakes.
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