Blew $300 on a faulty wire harness tester last month

Picked up a used wire harness tester off eBay for a steal. Guy said it worked fine. Hooked it up to a King Air harness and got false continuity readings for 3 hours before I realized the tester itself had a bad ground pin. Lost a whole afternoon and had to rent a proper tester from the shop down the road. Anybody else get burned by cheap test gear?

3 comments

3 Comments

charlie_ellis24d ago

Man that hurts. Ground pin issues are the worst because you naturally assume the tool is fine and start chasing ghosts in the harness. Had a guy lend me a multimeter once that was reading like half a volt off on every setting, drove me crazy for two days before I swapped it out.

troy83223d ago

Man that hurts" is right, but you know what hurts worse? Being the guy that didn't realize his own multimeter was off and spent three days rewiring a perfectly good control box for no reason. I'm not saying I did that last week, but I'm also not saying I didn't. Thing is, I had that meter since 2009 and it always worked fine. Then one day it just started telling me 24 volts was really 12, and I believed it like a fool. My boss finally grabbed a fresh one from the truck, took one reading, and just looked at me like I was the dumbest person alive. So yeah, ground pins and old meters. They'll make you question if you even know how to turn a screwdriver.

christopher_wells423d ago

Oh man, @charlie_ellis you're speaking my language. That half a volt off thing is the sneakiest kind of trouble. It's like the meter lies just enough to make you think you're dealing with a real voltage drop or a bad connection somewhere, not a bad tool. I've absolutely been there where you swap out a meter and suddenly everything makes sense, and you feel like an absolute clown for not trying that first. It's humbling for sure, but at least we're not alone in making that mistake.