[Jeff Higgins]

My gig was always tooling. I started on the 747 42 and 46 section (the fuselage barrel sections immediately behind the cockpit to the leading edge, then immediately behind the trailing edge to the leading edge of the empennage). I was working on the Floor Assembly Jigs (FAJ's) on which these were manufactured.

From there I went into the Interiors division. There I designed all of the forming tools for complex contour interior parts, like the sidewall and ceiling panels, along with the stowage bin doors. Steam heated mold dies in which we over crushed the nomex honeycomb cores while forming these composite sandwich panels. I'm proud to say that to this very day, every Boeing aircraft on which you can still fly, has all of those three panels produced on tooling of my design. Even 787, even though I was long gone from Interiors by then.

The last half of my career was spent in AOG Tool Engineering. "At home in my spare time", when there was not AOG work, Interiors tapped me for 787. In AOG (Aircraft on Ground) I designed maintenance and repair tooling, both for incident repair and heavy maintenance. Things like slings for removing the vertical fin, entire empennage, engines, engine struts, control surfaces, etc.

The most fun, though, was all of our in-situ machine tooling. For example, the aft main landing gear pivot mount, the one from which the assembly swings when it retracts, is a large bronze bushing pressed into a beam spanning from the rear spar to the center bulkhead. These things wear out, like any "suspension bushing". The AMM - Aircraft Maintenance Manual - has a procedure for removing that entire beam, placing it on a vertical mill, pressing out the old bushing, re-machining the hole oversize to remove corrosion, and replacing the bushing then boring it to final I.D. It's a lot of work to get that beam out and put it back in...

So, wouldn't it be cool if we could just do all of the required work right up there in the wheel well? Imagine the time saved. So, that's what I did. Designed the bushing removal and installation and machining equipment that we use right there in the wheel well. Fun stuff.

Then I got to travel the world either with Boeing AOG teams, or on my own, to show folks how to use my equipment. Nothing better when mechanics are unboxing the equipment and scratching their heads, wondering "what in the hell was that guy thinking" than to have that guy - me - right there with them. That was the really fun stuff.