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Shoutout to the retired Gulfstream guy in Savannah who changed my mind on torque seal
I used to slap torque seal on every fastener I touched, just to cover myself. A retired Gulfstream tech named Ray watched me do it at the Savannah service center and asked if I'd ever seen a seal hide a loose bolt. He said he stopped using it on flight controls after finding a cross-threaded fitting that passed a visual check for 3 cycles. That got me, because I'd been trusting the paint instead of the wrench. Now I only seal what the manual calls out, and I recheck anything I sealed by hand. Anyone else cut back on torque seal after a close call?
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leo_johnson8d ago
Man, this hits different because I've been on the other end of that. I used to work QA and I can't tell you how many times I found a problem that torque seal literally hid from me. The worst one was a jam nut on a flap actuator that had backed off just enough to pass the torque check but the seal was still intact across the gap, so the visual looked perfect. The thing people don't talk about is that torque seal also gives you a false sense of a paper trail. If the paint is broke, you assume somebody checked it, but the paint being there doesn't prove the torque is still good after vibration or thermal cycling. Ray was right to call it out, and your point about trusting the wrench instead of the paint is the real lesson.
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