Two Days, And Longer

     I have spent the past two days closely focused on the replacement for a highly configurable widget that doesn't work.  The replacement doesn't work, either, in the very same way.

     It is literally configured by the book and confirmed by factory technicians, looking at photographs and talking me through it.  The manufacturer's installation crew, hired contractors who have worked for them before and who I found clueful, did the initial setup and testing, and pronounced themselves stumped.  But they were confident the factory techs would sort it out. 

     This has not happened.

     One complication: I admit that I have been lazy.  This particular company -- we've bought major items from them for years -- has some of the worst habits I have ever encountered when it comes to drawing schematic diagrams.  They rarely manage to get all of one function on one page, and their continued-on-page-n jumps are hard to follow and often fragmentary; most of something happens on one page, the circuit goes to another page and wends through a series of connectors and jumpers, splits, does minor things on two other pages, and dead-ends.  You backtrack and find a tiny note that directs you elsewhere, and so on.  And on and on. 

     RCA was plagued by this, back when RCA was a big company that made every single item in the path from, say, the camera and microphone on a TV reporter in the studio to the TV set in your living room, and they (eventually!) came up with two answers: absolutely enormous blueprints for complex subsystems (one showing the "control ladder" for a 1970s TV transmitter was a yard high and over fifteen feet long!) and summaries or "one-line diagrams" that identified and followed critical functions.  Between the two, you could get from Point A to Point Z and have a good understanding of every intermediate step.  But the giant drawings relied on long-gone technology (not to mention workspace with a lot of open floor area!) and the one-lines took the careful attention of engineers who knew the whole system, inside and out.  Degreed-engineer time is too expensive for that these days, and by the time the product is in the hands of low-level people like me, they're six projects further on, and probably working for a different company.

     All of my older drawing-package books for this company's products have a Bobbi-added extensive array of color-coded tabs with drawing numbers and titles, careful highlighting and plenty of on-page notations (they're inconsistent about telling you where to look for continuations).  I haven't done that with these yet, and I need to.  I'm going to have to grit my teeth and trace this thing out fully, and try to understand why one of the most common configurations of this gadget is not working for us.  It's probably something simple, some detail that may be known to a few field techs by word-of-mouth but hasn't been written down.

     It's happened before.  The cause of an ugly and expensive fire at my work almost exactly thirty years ago came down to not relocating three large components that run very hot from an enclosed cabinet to an open-air mounting.  I'd seen it done at a different installation of a similar device, and no one there ever said why; they might not have known.*  The factory field-installation techs started doing it after the product had been on the market a few years, but they apparently never told the factory engineers.  No factory change notice was ever issued, no memo or bulletin, and the factory support engineers don't appear to have known it was being done.  But it was -- only it wasn't done in ours, and one Fall evening, at least one of them caught fire and cost my employer a small fortune.  Or small for them; I could have retired on what it cost, and lived in luxury.  The equipment was over twenty years old at the time.

     I don't think this is quite as bad an oversight but there's a piece missing from this puzzle, and someone knows what it is.  But so far, I don't know, and neither does the factory tech trying to help me troubleshoot it from hundreds of miles away. 
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* Sola constant-voltage transformers, for readers who know what those things are.  They run hot and often loud; this gadget had three of them, each slightly smaller than a footlocker.  The place where I saw them mounted on a wall even had fans blowing air across them.