This is what I love about the Sherlock Ohms postings. You can turn the equipment upsidedown to find the problem, but in the end, it was a line that had to be drawn darker. This is a common solution to difficult problems -- look at what was difficult at an earlier stage in the equipment's development.
So they were able to fix a CT scanner by drawing a line with black ink...Sometimes, I think it takes a better "detective" to find find a simple solution, like this one.
I agree, Chuck. Like many of the Sherlock Ohms blogs, it's hard to imagine how they figured out such an off-the-wall solution. It is certainly not intuitive. The trick here was remembering something odd from the past.
Sounds like a bad way to repair something. Could they have not repaired the wheel with a permanent solution. They should have replaced the wheel with a new and good one.
If I were their manager, I would not have allowed that type of repair. It will come back to haunt someone else in the future.
I guess in today's highly regulated environment, this temporary black pen fix would not be enough. In addition to solving the problem immediately, a root-cause countermeasure would also be needed to be performed by the equipment manufacturer so this problem would not occur again years later.
Insufficient contrast is a very subtle failure mode indeed. The system goes from functioning to intermittant to failed and nothing shows up as the cause. Hartridge has a similar problem with the linear encoders in their fuel injector system teststands, except that it is dirt, not fading. The normal fix is a new encoder for about $450, and two hours wait, and hope the new encoder is in stock. My cheap fix was to clean the scale in the encoder with denatured alcohol and a soft lense wipe tissue. Materials cost is about ten cents and the labor time is about five minutes and no recalibration is needed. But the profit is less, so the customer gets the _____.
I would guess they went for a permanent stripe, since they would know that the improvised ink line would eventially fail, just as the frist improvised ink line failed.
Yes, this is the second temporary repair. In some ways the first temporary repair is the most suprising since it sounds like it was done by the vendor during the installation process.
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