Boeing is having a rough time of it right now, with parts falling off its planes left, right and center. Just last week, a wheel came loose and smashed through a car, and earlier this year the door from a 737 Max aircraft broke off mid-flight. That mid-air disaster sparked an audit from the Federal Aviation Administration, which has gone far from well.
Tbh, I don’t see a problem with using Dawn dish soap and hotel key cards.
When another company has already made a product that perfectly suits your needs it’s absolutely reasonable to utilize that product.
The issue is that if they are doing this, it means that the workers doesn’t have the proper tools for the job.
The keycard should be replaces with a go/nogo custom card, and the soap should either be specified by brand in the manual or swapped to a certified lubecricant, that has been tested to work fully with the gasket and not cause deteriation or on any way affect the quallity of the seal.
I can’t know for certain what is specifically going on there but I do work in contract manufacturing for high end scientific equipment and critical medical electronics so I do know a fair bit about the processes used. For me the dishsoap and keycards on their own don’t raise any alarms. It sounds like the main issue is poorly written incomplete manufacturing instructions, which is a big enough issue on it’s own and is an absolute monster to try and fix once your production workers have gotten used to working like that.
The seals used are most likely silicone (it’s what we use on environmental chamber doors). If so there are very few chemicals that will harm them let alone dishsoap. We actually use 409 (a bathroom cleaner) spray to lubricate our seals where I work.
The dishsoap is almost certainly something they order and stock with their own internal shop supply number. The instructions most likely reference that number but that number would be meaningless to anyone else so the news article just said dawn dishsoap. It’s not going to be any random dishsoap because that’s not how industrial supply works. It would be more expensive for them to go pick up random dishsoap than to just keep ordering the same part number (that specific dawn dishsoap) in bulk from their industrial supplier.
Why in the world would you make custom tooling when there is a readily available off the shelf solution? You can just buy packs of keycards for dirt cheap and they are going to be a known thickness because they need to be to keep working in the same keycard slots. That thickness should be documented somewhere but it isn’t going to be in the manufacturing instructions because the production people don’t need it; they just need to know that the go/nogo gauge (the keycard) should fit. The more extraneous information you include on manufacturing instructions the greater the chance you have of someone missing or misreading something. If someone needs that extraneous info or something on the production floor isn’t right that’s when you bring in the engineer or process support staff who will have access to that info and the authority to make decisions based on it. If your production staff are making critical decisions on their own then something is very wrong with your manufacturing instructions (which sounds like the real problem here).
If the dishsoap is standardized in the documentation I don’t see any issue with it.
The hotel keycard, less so, since it is used to meassure how tight a fit is it will inevitably get worn, so the card needs to be durable with a predictable wear pattern, I have had hotel keycards made put of all kinds of plastic, paper even wood, they all have drasticly different thickness, wear patterns and durability.
If the documentation is too generic it looses it’s meaning.
All of the big hotel chains use the same plastic key cards that are credit card sized, they are durable and can be reused many times but also cheap enough to not fret over them if a customer forgets to return it before leaving. As a former aircraft maintainer myself, I don’t personally think it would be an issue if Boeing or its contractor ordered a bunch of standard hotel card blanks for seal testing, but if they were meant to use that as their test device it should be documented , there should be a part number for that card and authorized suppliers, and there should be a specific procedure to follow when using them. The article mentions the lack of documentation, so this was probably an unauthorized improvisation on the fly. I doubt these were being used to measure a specific tolerance, this case was probably something stupid like “the cabin pressurization check failed after we replaced the door, let’s poke a card along the seal to find where the gap is and squeeze extra sealant in that spot.” My specialty was avionics though, so I will admit I don’t really know much about the pressurization checks and seals, I was always at the plane for some other work whenever I encountered them.