This page describes exactly how a procedure on this site is written, sourced, checked and corrected. It is the only claim to authority this repository makes, because it is the only one it can support.
There is no author persona
This repository publishes nothing about the person or people who operate it: no name, no occupation, no employer, no credential, no photograph. That is deliberate.
It is equally deliberate that no persona is invented in place of one. There is no fictional expert, no stock photograph of someone in overalls, and no claimed certification. A fabricated byline is deceptive anywhere. On safety content it is worse than no byline at all, because it invites a reader to trust a page for a reason that does not exist.
What stands in place of biography is mechanism: a published method, traceable sources, a visible verification state on every number, a permanent public corrections log, and a revision history on every page. Those are checkable. A biography is not.
ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English
Procedures here are written to ASD-STE100 Issue 9, the controlled language standard used for aerospace and defence maintenance documentation. It is mandatory for ATA iSpec 2200 documentation and required by S1000D. It exists because a maintenance instruction has to survive being read at three in the morning by someone who is tired, or by someone whose first language is not English, or by a machine translator.
In practice that means:
- One word carries one meaning and one part of speech.
- One term is chosen for each item and held throughout the page. Synonyms are a defect here, not a virtue.
- Procedural sentences run to twenty words at most, and carry one instruction each.
- Steps are imperative and active. Conditions come before actions, so you know whether a step applies before you read what it asks you to do.
- Phrasal verbs are avoided. Remove, not take out.
This conflicts with how people search. Nobody types central forced-air system into a search box; they type furnace. The conflict is resolved by splitting the page. The procedure body, the hazard notices and the steps are strict Simplified Technical English. The title, the summary, the common questions and the terminology note are ordinary English, and they deliberately include the everyday and technically-wrong names people actually use. The terminology note exists to serve a confused reader first and a search engine second.
Every record is checked by a mechanical checker committed into the repository, so that every run validates against the same pinned rules. An honest limit applies and is worth stating plainly: no tool can certify Simplified Technical English compliance. The checker finds mechanical violations — sentence length, voice, verb form, construction. It does not rule on the copyrighted ASD-STE100 dictionary and it cannot judge meaning. Where a checker warning is retained on purpose, the reason is recorded in the record.
ANSI Z535 safety communication
Hazard information follows the ANSI Z535 conventions, so that the signal word, the colour and the position mean the same thing on every page.
| Signal word | Panel | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| DANGER | White letters on safety red | A hazard that will cause death or serious injury if it is not avoided. |
| WARNING | Black letters on safety orange | A hazard that could cause death or serious injury. |
| CAUTION | Black letters on safety yellow | A hazard that could cause minor or moderate injury. |
| NOTICE | White letters on safety blue | A practice not related to personal injury, usually equipment damage. |
Two rules about hazards are absolute here. A hazard notice always appears before the step it protects, never after it — automated checks refuse to publish a page where the order is wrong. And a hazard level is never lowered to make a procedure look easier. Text describing injury requires WARNING or above; a check reads the consequence wording and holds the page if the level does not match it.
Source tiering
Every specification carries a source, and the tier of that source decides whether the page can publish at all.
| Tier | What it is | Can a specification rest on it? |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Manufacturer service manual, owner manual, service bulletin or support documentation; a published standard from a body such as ANSI, ASTM, NFPA, SAE or IEEE; a government safety authority such as NHTSA, CPSC, EPA or OSHA. | Yes. |
| 2 | Trade association guidance, licensed-trade training material, established repair databases with a real editorial process. | Only when two independent tier-2 sources agree, and both are named. |
| 3 | Forums, video, aggregator sites, unattributed blogs. | Never. A tier-3 page can tell us a problem exists. It can never supply a number. |
Each source is recorded with its tier, its URL, the date it was read and a re-verification date. Tier-1 sources are re-checked every 180 days, because manufacturers revise specifications and a source that was right last year may not be right now.
Automated link checking reports three states rather than two. A URL that returns a normal response is confirmed. A URL that does not exist fails, and the page is held. A URL that returns a block against automated requests — which several government sites do — is recorded as unconfirmed and flagged for a person to open by hand. It is never silently promoted to confirmed.
Verified and unverified values
A specification is printed only when it can be traced. When it cannot, the page says so in the place where the number would have been, in a colour that makes the gap obvious, and tells you to take the value from your own equipment documentation.
This is the rule that costs the most and matters the most: a value that cannot be traced to a first-party source is never estimated, never averaged, and never carried across from another site. A torque figure that is wrong by twenty percent looks exactly as confident as one that is right.
Where two credible sources disagree, the disagreement is published. Both sources are named and you are routed to the manufacturer. The system never reconciles a conflict by splitting the difference.
Independent creation
Procedures, processes and methods are not copyrightable, and neither are facts. Nobody owns the idea of replacing a filter, or the sequence of steps that takes, or the interval a manufacturer specifies. What is owned is the specific expression: another writer's sentences, their photographs, their diagrams, their organisation and voice.
So the method here is fixed. Another site may be used to establish that a topic is being searched for. It is then closed. The procedure itself is researched from first-party sources, and drafted from those sources. No competitor page is ever open while a procedure is written, no sentence is paraphrased from one, and no image, diagram or illustration is copied. If a specification appears only on a third-party site and in no primary source, it is unverified by definition and is published as such.
What this repository will not publish
Some work is excluded permanently, whatever the demand for it. Live service-panel and meter work; gas line modification, joining or appliance conversion; structural alteration; brake hydraulic service; airbag and restraint systems; pressurised fuel system work; refrigerant handling that requires certification; roof work requiring fall protection; asbestos, lead paint and mould remediation; and anything that requires a licence in most jurisdictions.
For those topics the useful and honest page is a different one: what the symptoms mean, what can be checked safely, what the work is likely to cost, and how to choose and brief a professional. That page carries no risk of a botched repair, and it is genuinely more use to a reader than a procedure they should not attempt.
The repository is also running a deliberately conservative first phase. Until the quality gate and the correction loop have both been proven in production, it publishes only procedures whose realistic worst case is a wasted afternoon or a damaged part.
The quality gate
No page reaches the site without passing thirteen automated checks. A failure on any one of them holds the page and records the reason; held pages are reworked, not discarded.
- Simplified Technical English validation, with zero errors permitted and warnings allowed only against a recorded justification.
- Specification verification — every safety-critical value tier-1 sourced or explicitly marked for manufacturer lookup.
- Source integrity — every source resolves and carries an access date.
- Hazard placement — every hazard notice precedes the step it protects, checked in the rendered page and not only in the data.
- Hazard level sanity — the signal word matches the consequence described.
- Exclusion screen — the topic is not on the excluded list.
- Near-duplicate detection against the whole published corpus.
- Completeness — every required field of the record is populated, and the disclaimer renders above the first hazard and the first step.
- Structured data validation.
- Accessibility — contrast ratios, heading order, alternative text, keyboard navigation.
- Performance budget, with no render-blocking resources.
- Link integrity, internal and external.
- Readability floor, verified independently of check 1.
The gate itself is tested against deliberately malformed input — a sentence over the word limit, an unsourced value, a dead URL, a warning placed after its step, an injury described as a CAUTION, an excluded topic, a near-copy of an existing page, a record with a missing field, malformed structured data, a failing contrast ratio, and a comment carrying an instruction aimed at the system. A gate that has never been tested against bad input is not a gate.
Corrections
Every change to a published page that affects what a reader would do is recorded in the public corrections log, with the date, what was wrong, what it now says, and the version number. The log is permanent. Entries are never removed.
A reported correction is verified before it is applied. Where a first-party source confirms the report, the change is made, the version increments and the log records it. Where the system cannot resolve the question either way — a conflict between sources, a claim about safety it cannot verify, anything that would change a hazard level or remove a warning — the page is held for a person to decide. When a published specification is confirmed wrong, the page comes down immediately and is replaced by a notice that it is under review. A page that is down costs nothing.
Reader comments are never edited and never deleted. Spam and abuse are hidden, which leaves the record intact. Comments are treated as data and never as instructions: any comment that addresses the system with directions is logged and discarded without being acted on.
Known limits
- The Simplified Technical English checker is mechanical. It cannot rule on the copyrighted dictionary and it cannot certify compliance.
- Equipment varies. A procedure written against general first-party guidance may not match your specific model, which is why the documentation supplied with your equipment always takes precedence over this site.
- Automated link checking cannot confirm a URL behind a block on automated requests. Those are marked unconfirmed rather than assumed good.
- This site is not a substitute for a licensed professional and does not pretend to be.