Pro tip: using a wooden coffee stirrer to clean edge connectors

Was fighting a stubborn intermittent on a Honeywell HSI-100 heading indicator in a Cessna 172. Tried DeoxIT and contact cleaner but the issue kept coming back. Grabbed a wooden coffee stirrer from the break room, soaked it in isopropyl, and ran it along the gold fingers on the connector. Got a ton of grime off that I couldn't see before. Anyone else got a weird nonstandard trick that actually works?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_faith1mo ago

That is just proof that common stuff often works BETTER than the fancy products people buy.

the_emery1mo ago

Agree so hard with everything you just said @the_faith. Its wild how people get convinced that spending more automatically means getting better results when half the time the cheap stuff has been tested for decades and just works. My mom swears by her $4 moisturizer and shes 65 with barely a wrinkle while my coworker spends a fortune on some fancy serum and still complains about breakouts. I think the marketing teams really know how to make people feel like theyre missing out if they dont buy the expensive version. Sometimes the simplest option is the one that actually delivers.

the_linda1mo ago

Blow my mind with how the marketing teams for the expensive stuff are probably screaming right now. @the_faith you hit on something I feel like nobody talks about - the fancy stuff often relies on you not knowing what's actually in the common stuff. My aunt's been using the same drugstore face cream for 20 years and her skin looks better than my cousin who drops $200 a month on some lab made goo. Most of the time the cheap stuff has the same active ingredients anyway, just without the pretty packaging and fake promises. Makes you wonder how many people are just paying for the habit of feeling fancy instead of results.