Maintenance

Commission by skyeypony

Maintenance is a fact-o life for any kind of equipment and the general rule of hoof goes that the bigger it gets, the more that it needs. The big issue is knowing what needs the most TLC. Ignoring the obvious trail of smoke or the sound of something going bonkers you usually want to try to find the problem before it becomes a problem.

Diagnostics can be done one of two ways: you hook something up to something else, or you use a built in test. Having an external test set has advantages in that it is easy to upgrade and if you have a lot of a particular piece of equipment on hand you can cut down on what you have to carry if you can use the same test unit on each one. A built in test unit (BIT test for short) is a common choice for civilian and military heavy equipment because of its reliability and hardiness. Each version does basically the same thing, runs parts through a series of tests and measures their response against a pre-set standard. When a test fails, you found a part you need to check/adjust/replace.

When you have equipment that either moves or shakes a lot, there is an inevitable point in time where cables and fluid lines get loose and causes faults in tests. It can even be as simple as going old school Nintendo on a circuit card.

When you put a system in a variety of different conditions and you need it to work the same way, periodic tweaks need to happen… or everything just decides to stop working. Bells and whistles go off, people lose their temper, the fault bleeds over to other components and causes actual damage from either too much power or too little-it’s a mess, but usually you can see it coming and prepare ahead of time.

When you use the equipment, sooner or later it breaks. Circuits burn out, wires fray, cable heads fall apart, bulbs die, and of course eventually something always seems to catch on fire. Take the best care of everything that you can, but always bring a few spares.

Every now and then you will see a result that says something is broken when in fact it’s not. When this happens you’ll want to see if you can move the failure around by changing settings, eventually it will help you narrow in on what is really broken. This requires in depth know-how of your systems set-up and can take up to a few hours if your rig is really complex, which is why simplicity is much, much better.

If you have to have something running constantly (like life support) you are going to want to have a way to know when things break, or when they start to wear down as it’s happening. Like the dashboard light in a car that tells you to head to the mechanic, each subsystem needs it’s own way of saying hello.

You will notice I left engines out of this weeks post-that will get it’s own post very soon. I apologise for rambling, it’s late and tomorrow will be early-feedback is always appreciated, Cheers!