As a sheet metal mechanic with the 567th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City, Melvin Pruitt is focused on the safety of the airmen navigating the skies above. With that approach to his work, Pruitt was able to develop a tool that provides further freedom from jeopardy.
“I’m ecstatic,” said Pruitt, who’s been at Tinker Air Force Base for almost 15 years. “I thank the Air Force for giving me an opportunity to serve in more ways than one. As someone who helps to keep the planes moving, to find something crucial to flight safety means a lot to me.”
Pruitt created and secured a patent for a hand wrench that can be used in hard-to-reach places on aircraft. He developed the idea after being tasked with working on kickboard panels on a B-1. Being that the panel fasteners were located in a difficult place to reach and it was a flight critical area, Pruitt wanted to ensure they were secure for the safety of the airmen.
“That location is very critical because it’s near the flight pedals,” said Pruitt, who is a machinist by trade. “If a fastener isn’t properly installed and it fails, it could lock the pedal down and the pilot can’t steer the plane.”
With previous tools, Pruitt said access to these tight areas of the aircraft was difficult. The tools were either too big or too long to reach the fasteners. Essentially, there was no way to get in and do the job properly.
The hand wrench, made of hardened steel to maintain its durability, has many uses across an aircraft.
“It's very versatile and can be used on a lot of different weapon systems,” said Pruitt, who received a lot of encouragement from his colleagues throughout the development. “It also works on the monitors and kick panels inside the aircraft and in other places, depending on where they want to use it. Once you engage it and tighten it down with the nose piece, the back part of the wrench holds the nut plate so you can tighten it.”
The sheet metal mechanic refined the hand wrench over a seven-year period and created a prototype to see how it would work. Once it passed muster, he drew up blueprints and worked with his supervisor to advance it to the machine shop where it was made.
“The slender design, with the slope, allows it to get down into the side of the panel holding the nut plate,” Pruitt said. “It's contoured to give you room to put the nut plate in. The slope allows you to get into 90-degree, 45-degree and straight angles, and the clocking mechanism lets you turn the head to those angles.
“What makes it so versatile is that you can flip the tool over and use it in both the right and left positions at all three angles. You don't need another tool to go from left to right.”
And the hand wrench has the potential to work in other spaces, as well.
“Yes, absolutely,” Pruitt said. “Anything you're working on that has an extremely tight space with different angles and degrees, this tool will work. I think it has the potential to do more than just aircraft.”
Although he’s designed previous tools in the past, this is the first patent he’s pursued. He worked with an engineer at Tinkler Air Force Base to secure it.
“Once we got all the information to the engineer, we were good to go,” he said. “It just took off, and in maybe a year, a little over a year, we pretty much started on the patent.”
United States Patent Office Patent: #12,263,520 B1
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