Spent 5 hours chasing a bad ground on a Garmin G5000 install

I had this weird glitch on a King Air panel where the left PFD would randomly flicker during taxi. After checking all the connectors and swapping the display with a known good unit from the shop, the problem came right back. Turned out to be a ground wire that looked perfectly fine but had a tiny break inside the insulation near the crimp terminal. I must have checked every other possibility before I finally pulled out the multimeter and did a voltage drop test on each ground point. That little break was adding just enough resistance to mess things up under vibration. Five hours wasted on something that took five minutes to fix once I knew what to look for. Has anyone else found a creative way to catch intermittent ground faults faster, or am I the only one who learns this the hard way?

2 comments

2 Comments

jade2213d agoTop Commenter

And honestly a heat gun helps too! Hit those suspect grounds with a little heat and see if the glitch comes back, especially on a taxi day. Vibration and heat together find the nastiest breaks way faster than just wiggling them cold.

alexlewis3d ago

Oh man, I've been there way too many times. A voltage drop test is definitely the right call, but you might be overthinking it a bit with the multimeter from the start. A good old fashioned wiggle test with the ground wire while watching the display will sometimes catch those intermittent breaks way faster than hunting around with probes.