Quality problems

In my column last week, I asked, "We sure you have experienced many "fit and finish" quality problems, both at work and in your personal life. Please share your favorite!"

Responses:

One of my first projects as a new engineer was to build a decker to dewater sludge. We had an old cast iron decker that was my model and we were going to reuse the cylinder and couch roll. The new decker was going to be stainless. I took all the dimensions for the builder but did not take into account that the thickness of the stainless would not be the same as the thickness of the cast. Once the unit was delivered we had to modify the supports for the bearing housings to get everything to fit. It was a good lesson.

Early in my career I worked on a project to build a computer material and energy simulation of an integrated newsprint mill. Dropping in process modules to simulate the mill was the easy part, but we struggled for weeks trying to get an initial mass balance. We finally went back to the customer site and in our first meeting found out, "oh, our tonnage is in metric tonnes, not short tons." This explained our approximate 10% mass issues throughout...

Once we imported new pressure screen baskets from china and bores for bolts were not at proper locations hence had to be reworked.

You may take this week's quiz here.