Avionics Tool Kit Checklist: Micro Drivers, Crimpers and Pin Extractors

Avionics work is small fasteners, connectors and looms. Which means the tools are small, numerous, individually inexpensive and collectively the most easily mislaid set in the hangar.

The checklist

Drivers

• Micro drivers, slotted and cross point, in a range down to the sizes instrument panel and connector backshell screws actually use.
• Torque limiting drivers where a manual specifies a figure for a connector or a mount. A connector overtightened once is a connector that will fail intermittently for years.
• Hex and Torx bits in small sizes, which appear more often in modern avionics than in airframe work.

Pliers and cutters

• Precision long nose, bent nose and flat nose.
• Fine diagonal cutters, and separate cutters kept only for wire, because a pair used on anything harder will not cut a conductor cleanly afterwards.
• Wire strippers sized for aviation gauges, ideally the type that cannot nick a strand. A nicked strand is a future open circuit and it is invisible once the boot is on.

Crimping

• A ratcheting crimp tool with the die sets your connector families need, and it has to be a controlled tool rather than a generic crimper. A crimp is a mechanical and electrical joint made once, and its quality is entirely determined by the tool.
• Positioners for the contact sizes you work with.
• A go/no-go gauge if the procedure calls for one.

Pin extractors, which deserve their own paragraph

An extractor releases a contact from a connector by acting on the retention clip. The right size releases it cleanly. The wrong size, or a pick, deforms the clip, and then the contact either falls out later or will not seat, and a ten minute job becomes a connector replacement and a loom disturbance.

Contact sizes 12, 16, 20 and 22 cover most of what you meet. Our extractor set is 96 EUR ex VAT for eight covering that range. See also cable and wire tools.

Test and inspection

• A multimeter with a current calibration certificate. In a Part-145 organisation this is controlled test equipment and an auditor will ask for the certificate.
• A continuity tester or tone generator for tracing.
• An inspection mirror and a good light. Most avionics faults are found by looking at a connector properly.

Consumables

Heat shrink, lacing tape, cable ties, contacts and backshells for your families, and self amalgamating tape. Keep these physically separate from tools, because they are what makes a drawer untidy and an untidy drawer is an unchecked drawer.

Why this is the first kit to shadow

If you shadow one box in your organisation, make it the avionics kit.

It has the highest tool count per box, the smallest tools, and the worst consequence if one stays inside an aircraft, because avionics work happens behind panels and inside structures that then get closed. A ninety piece kit without shadowing cannot honestly be checked in a couple of minutes, so in practice at the end of a shift it is not checked at all.

With a cut two tone insert the check is visual. Our avionics kit is supplied that way as standard, with each tool etched, because supplying ninety loose small tools in a case and calling it tool control would be a contradiction. If you already own the tools, custom foam is cut around what you hold.

The interior consideration

In business aviation and airliner cabins, avionics work happens next to trim that costs more than the aircraft's tooling budget. A dropped micro driver behind a veneer panel is not a lost tool, it is a decision about whether to remove trim that a completion centre fitted.

Which is why tool retention rather than tool quantity is the design question in this kit. See business aviation.