Appreciation post for the old Korry switch tester at our shop

Last Tuesday I was trouble-shooting a stubborn PFD on a King Air 200 and the old Korry tester we keep on the bench saved me three hours of chasing wires. It lit up a shorted pin that the DMM was reading fine but the switch was dropping voltage under load. Has anyone else found that older dedicated test gear still beats a multimeter in certain situations?

3 comments

3 Comments

lisaf3819d ago

The 200 hour clock on that Korry tester is probably way out of calibration if it's been sitting on a bench since 1995. I've seen those old units drift so bad they light up good pins and miss bad ones, which is exactly the kind of false positive that would make you chase a short that doesn't exist. A Fluke 87 with a good set of test leads and a known good ground reference is way more reliable for dynamic load testing if you know how to use the min/max function right. Plus, that old Korry tester costs ten times what a decent meter costs and takes up bench space you could use for something that actually gets calibrated yearly. I'll take a meter I can trust with a fresh calibration sticker over any antique that's been kicking around since the Reagan administration.

caleb26219d agoOG Member

You're right on the money with that. I had an old Korry unit on my bench for years and finally tossed it after it passed a batch of relays that were all bad on the Fluke. Those things just drift way too much to be trusted for anything serious.

hannahk1918d ago

Wow, you guys actually changed my mind on this. I used to think those old testers were bulletproof but @caleb262 brought up a solid point about how easy it is to miss a bad batch of relays if the unit itself is drifting. Makes me wonder if I should send mine out for calibration or just replace it with a meter.