[Tubejunke]

Not to be flippant or anything, but quite often with troubleshooting it is the most simple and obvious things that often get looked over. A good example of this comes to mind in a situation that I recently and unfortunately experienced. I work as an electronics technician (maintenance) in a manufacturing facility (factory). LOL! At any rate, there was a rather complicated part of our process that developed erratic/intermittent problems.

Well, after the supposed best of the best in our crew took pot shot guesses and a number of "cold boots" the German company flew over an engineer with a laptop to hopefully fix what everyone had determined must be a software issue. As it turns out there were several 3 phase contactors that had intermittently high resistance contacts. This was most likely due to exposure to dirt and chemical residue over time as the electrical enclosure had no positive air pressure to keep such things out as do all of the others (most are air conditioned in a separate room).

Point being that in this case a lot of money was spent and production time lost because of the most rudimentary problem that we could have had and the first thing that we should have gone over with a fine toothed comb. In my defense I will add that I asked about checking the array of electromechanical contactors and was told that they had all been checked. I still checked one and showed the boss the strange readings, so he let me change that single one, but seemed resistant to letting me go further. Sometimes too many minds involved (and bosses looking to impress their bosses by being the one who saved the day) can really hinder the troubleshooting process. Just sayin'