Always a good sight! Especially after 7 hours of flying and ‘hoping’ the Nav knew what he was doing…
Bonus points if you recognize it from this perspective…
And this tool went in and out of ‘legality’ a couple of times over my career…
Answers below the fold…
Approaching Diego Garcia from the east as the sun sets. It is actually Wake Island, I grabbed the wrong picture from my photos. Grrr…
The tool is a pair of the infamous safety wire pliers!
Here’s a video by Adam Savage demonstrating them.
One of the reasons they were ‘outlawed’ a few times was that you could pinch the safety wire if you were doing multiple twists on the same wire for multiple nuts/items. If you pinched the wire, it invalidated the entire safety wire process.
I’ve seen those on the store tool racks, but never thought how it works (or remember to look it up on Net). That is pretty cool.
That reminds me of the “wire wrap” tool that replaced soldering on termination blocks. Invariably out of a 50 conductor cable termination, the wire wrap would tear a wire off short..
Given that QA did not like to see slack in a cable, we dreaded using that tool.
When I first started in the industry there was a lot of wire-wrap used. I haven’t seen it in the wild in a long time, but I still have a full set of wire-wrap and unwrap tools sitting on a shelf in my garage.
I’ve got a pair of safety wire pliers I appropriated many years ago. I didn’t steal them: the squadron I was in decommissioned – the command put all the small tools and relatively inexpensive things that were going to go to DRMO into boxes in the hangar and told us to take what we wanted before it got shipped off; I ended up with a few cool things from that evolution…mostly pretty well used, but still serviceable.
I don’t use them for much since I don’t work on airplanes in my spare time, but they come in handy on occasion. I still keep a roll of 40 thousandths stainless safety wire on hand because you just never know when you might need some. I guess that kind of replaced the baling wire I grew up with, but when you need a quick fix for any number of things, safety wire is awesome and the pliers make quick work of twisting it tight.
Safety wire, the evil necessity of airplanes. Adam is wise to demo with soft AL wire, real safety wire is stainless and will stick/slice/scratch you like a needle in an instant.
And poke a nasty home if/when you forget to bend over the pigtail. Or worse, some [censored] forgets to bend the pigtail and you find it the hard way.
Diego Garcia and a tool you would have used many times if you were a “One Wire” or on the “Check Crew”.
Ask this “Tweet” how he knows…
Nah, Wake Island.
That’s what I thought too.
Poor Adam Savage, coming to the game late. Better than never, I suppose, but he needs to get out more. Hollywood is no place to learn The Real Stuff.
I’ve had 2 Safety Wire Pilers since the late 1960s; every race bike I built for 30 years (road racing – dirt is something you wash off motorcycles, not ride them in) had EVERYTHING wired. That I grew up around aircraft did give me a head start on knowing such stuff existed and how it’s done. I still have them, still use them a fair amount, and multiple pounds of stainless wire, from .020″ to .061″. .025″ and .032″ are what I wind up using the most. You want a threaded fastener to stay in place AT TORQUED VALUE it’s either safety wired or cotter pinned with castellated nuts.
And, yes, I have drilled Grade 5 and Grade 8 hex head and socket head cap screws for wire by hand with #69 (.029″) and #64 (.036″) bits. Pro Tip: buy those size bits in bulk……
Everything that contained fluids, EXCEPT brake lines. I never heard an explanation for that, but suspect, since the banjo bolts were hollow, too many brake failures were traced to propagating cracks from drilling them for wire.
(My only track crash was brake related, sigh…)
The safety wire pliers brought back memories for sure. Mostly 20 and 32 thousandths but there was a little 41 thousandths in there too way back when. I still use them but rarely now.
Don’t know the island but the picture brought home that Navs must have been just as important as pilots
Ah, safety wire pliers. I have a pair from when I owned an airplane. The owner could do some minor maintenance and some involved safety wire.
Didn’t recognize the island because I never flew that far east nor west.
Diego Garcia. Spent a week there one day. Don’t have to be working on aircraft to need them. The gun part of a CIWS used them as well.
I remember seeing it for the first time in early 74 on one of the first P3’s to land there. We had a lot of fun chasing the Russian Indian Ocean Squadron flying from Diego to Bandar Abbas Iran and back. Living in hooches with the Seabees was interesting.
Those pliers are newer than the ones we used on the boat. Ours didn’t have the rubber insert at the cutters. Yes, lots of lock wired fasteners on a sub.
I’ve got a pair for .024″-.032″ and another pair for .041″ stainless steel safety wire. I had a brief stint in aviation doing non-military propeller overhauls. Somewhere I have a diagram showing different ways of doing multiple fasteners. It was a skill I mastered well. The layout between the fasteners was as important as having the proper number of twists per inch required by the FAA documentation and mine always passed inspection. Not enough and the fastener could come loose. Too many stresses the wire and could break. Wrapping the fastener in the wrong direction would not hold the torque properly. As good as I was, I disliked doing the .041″ which was only on the larger 4 or 5 blade props. Skewering a finger or places on my hand with the sharp end of the wire hurt like a mother! Oh well, at least all the blood came off the prop after balancing and a final cleaning.
All- Thanks for the comments and yes, ‘real’ safety wire WILL chew you up! It is Wake, I grabbed the wrong picture… My bad.
Stainless steel safety wire is also used on a several items for locomotives. The speed sensors for the drive axles use it. I had to inspect these in my last job. Yes, the wire can chew you up.
Also used to keep busy fingers from taking the gas piston assembly apart on M-60 barrels.
That tool is a necessity for any early Jaguars up through the late 1970’s
You want your driveshaft, brakes and half shafts to stay put, gotta wire em. Heck, I think I even had to wire the bolts on the fuel tank access plate.
Feral- Didn’t know that.
0007- LOL
Terra- I’ve heard that.
Yep. Safety wire pliers were a great thing, especially if you had a dozen or so connectors to do at one time. Then they outlawed the damned things… THEY didn’t work the flightline.
Safety wire pliers, loved those things! Early 90s, SPC/67T, rush job, flyer’s gotta fly, got out of PT to do a Blackhawk tail rotor hub, multiple bolts, double wired in sequence, couple hours work to get it right…TI walks up, says it’s a beautiful job and proceeds to cut every wire…having done it multiple times, didn’t have the TM out, forgot the shim, had to start over…