Question about cleaning fiber optic connectors before testing

Honestly, I see a lot of guys at my shop just doing a quick wipe on their sleeve before plugging a fiber optic test set in. Tbh, that's asking for trouble. I learned the hard way after a 737 had a recurring comms fault that took us three days to pin down. The issue was tiny bits of dust on the ST connector faces that our visual fault locator missed. Now I use those one-click cleaning pens every single time, even if the connector looks clean. It adds maybe 30 seconds to the job but saves hours of chasing ghosts. Ngl, the shop lead got on my case about using 'too many' pens until I showed him the test results. Has anyone else had a similar headache with what seemed like a clean connector?

3 comments

3 Comments

wright.luna20d ago

You mentioning chasing ghosts for three days hits home. I once spent a whole shift convinced we had a bad LRU, but it was just my own greasy fingerprint on the connector. I felt like a real genius that day.

ericnguyen19d agoMost Upvoted

Oh come on, that's not a ghost, that's just good troubleshooting! Finding your own mistake means you checked everything and ruled out the actual bad part. That fingerprint could have caused a real issue later, so you actually fixed it before it failed.

blairj5519d ago

Exactly, that's just solid work lol. Catching your own slip-up is part of the process.