A 1950s wiring diagram I found in a hangar in Wichita made me rethink how spoiled we are
I was cleaning out an old cabinet at our shop near Wichita and found a binder of hand drawn wiring diagrams from a guy who worked on Constellations back in the 50s. Every single pin, every splice, all done with a pencil and a slide rule, no multimeter, no schematics from the factory half the time. I counted 14 pages just for one radio rack, and each wire had its own hand written note about what it fed and why. Meanwhile I got annoyed last week because a CAN bus fault took me two hours to chase with a laptop and a breakout box. These guys were doing it in a freezing hangar with a test light and a lot of patience. Anyone else ever run across old hand drawn docs like that, or am I just lucky my shop never threw anything out?
That binder sounds like a real piece of history, and it is a shame how much of that stuff ends up in dumpsters when shops clean house. I have seen a few hand drawn sketches from that era and the level of detail always gets me, guys mapping out every ground and splice from memory because there was no other choice. It is good your shop held onto it instead of tossing it.