Changed my tune on those new digital door lock testers

My old foreman, Jerry, told me to stick with the old contact method for checking door locks, said the digital ones were just extra junk to carry. I mean, I listened for like a year. Then on a job with a finicky door in an old office building, I borrowed a buddy's digital tester. It showed the lock was dropping out for like 200 milliseconds, something I never would have caught with a meter. Fixed a random nuisance stop that had been bugging the tenant for months. Who else has tried these and what brand are you using?

3 comments

3 Comments

noahwood21d ago

Yeah, the part about the old timers being stuck in their ways... I get it. I fought using a thermal camera for the longest time. My boss kept pushing it on me, and I just saw it as a toy. Then I had this one wall that was always damp, and the camera showed a cold spot from a pipe leak inside the drywall... saved me from tearing out half the place looking for it. I still use my old methods most days, but that thing comes out for the weird ones now.

path4722d ago

My buddy Dave in HVAC had the same thing happen with a new vibration analyzer. He swore by his ear and a screwdriver for years until it caught a bad compressor bearing he totally missed. It's always the old timers who hate the new tools, but sometimes that extra data point solves the mystery. I get the resistance to more gear, but if it finds the problem, it's worth the space in the bag. Jerry sounds like half the guys I know, stuck in their ways until they see it work.

garcia.wren21d ago

My uncle was a diesel mechanic who refused to use a code reader, called them idiot lights. He finally broke down and bought one when a new truck had an intermittent fault that took him three days to trace. The scanner pointed to a failing injector driver module in under a minute. He still grumbled about it, but that tool stayed on his bench.