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geolemon wrote:That's always a painful lesson - always get a confirmation in writing.
Just yesterday, I had a project that I've been working on go down in flames:
We are building a first article prototype engine harness for a small aircraft - we've never built it before. We discover that the two engine manifold temperature sensors that they provided to us have preterminated wiring attached that is a full 6" shorter than the part drawings show that they should be. Our client's contact agent tells me "we've never had this problem before - doublecheck your measurements"
After spending a whole afternoon reworking and tweaking my fixtures, taking out any extra length allowed by drawing tolerances, I have confirmed that these certainly won't work.
So, the next morning, I contact the client again, and this time I am told that if I need to, we can extend the wires to reach, particularly since this is a first-article, and quite often first-article production like this isn't used in production (ie. not actually installed into an aircraft), but rather is dissected to ensure we have built it properly, before we begin producing them. No worries - it makes sense.
We move forward, and spend the rest of the day routing wiring, running it through looming, terminating it into military-spec connectors, installing adhesive-lined heat shrink - a lot of work.
I followed up with an Email to the client, asking the agent to confirm what he had authorized us to do over the phone.
The reply?
"We actually prefer if you do not splice these wires."
We spent most of today undoing much of the work that we had done yesterday, and are now awaiting replacement sensors.
Two days of work by our team, and promises to management in both organizations, could have been avoided if I had simply requested that he send me an Email confirmation when I had him on the phone to begin with.
Definitely one of those painful lessons.