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[Stephen Swaffer]

Perhaps a real engineer with a boss that hasn't a clue might-worked for engineers before that were happy to lie to whomever and go to confession on the weekend-and happy to admit it (behind closed doors).

[John Roberts {JR}]

Sometimes the customer service contact is wary about being blamed for the failure or incurring liability. I recall a similarly BS excuse from a car dealership service manager. Back a few decades ago I had the local car dealership replace my spark plugs and do an oil change. Within about 2 weeks of the service, my car developed a rough idle and a miss. Checking under the hood for something easy like a loose spark plug wire, instead I found a loose spark plug that I could easily remove by hand. Further the plug electrode was burned up. Apparently the loose attachment to the head, reduced heat flow away from the plug. I borrowed a plug wrench from a co-worker and replaced the bad plug with a new one. Then I drove over to the dealership to show him the burnt up plug. His explanation was even more fantastic than your LED engineer. He argued that the plug condition looked like water damage (WTF?). Water damage inside a combustion chamber? Then he offered to give me a new plug. :-(. I told him I didn't want anything from him, but to give him some corrective feedback so his mechanics don't make the same mistake again. Arghhh people...

JR

[Stephen Swaffer]

It can be hard to admit you made a bad decision or an honest mistake-but when troubleshooting it never pays to be too big to fail.  I no longer work for that engineer-got tired of BS being valued more than real solutions.  Had I been patient and stayed with that employer I would no longer work for him either-it caught up with him and instead of being one of the top brass at the facility like he used to be, he has a low level inspector job with no one under him anymore.

If they want their LEDs to be better quality, they will listen and learn from Mike's generosity in doing their R&D for them!

[Steve M Smith]

The failed power supply diode then fixed itself before damaging any other electronics or the main storage battery.

Whilst semiconductors like to upgrade themselves to full conductors, I have never known one to downgrade itself back to semi status!
 
 
Steve.

[Mike Sokol]

Time to initiate the TMG (Technobabble Malfunction Generator) at http://www.springhole.net/writing_roleplaying_randomators/malfunctionmaker.htm

When you click on it, you get randomly generated and really cool sounding explanations for system failures like the one below. 

The upper ionic flux hyperdrive regulator has short circuited, resulting in an explosion in the larboard sonic power field.

[Tim McCulloch]

Time to initiate the TMG (Technobabble Malfunction Generator) at http://www.springhole.net/writing_roleplaying_randomators/malfunctionmaker.htm

When you click on it, you get randomly generated and really cool sounding explanations for system failures like the one below. 

The upper ionic flux hyperdrive regulator has short circuited, resulting in an explosion in the larboard sonic power field.

That was my second guess...

[frank kayser]

Seems it's too expensive to analyze the problem and fix production in China. There's always another fool in line to buy the cr*p.  Remember way back when "Made in Japan" meant a cheap joke?  China may learn that lesson eventually.

If Mike were to come up with a definitive fix and served it to them in gold ink on a silver platter,I doubt any change  would be made. Hell, these are selling.   The saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" applies only to their business model, not the actual product anymore.

[John Roberts {JR}]

Seems it's too expensive to analyze the problem and fix production in China. There's always another fool in line to buy the cr*p.  Remember way back when "Made in Japan" meant a cheap joke?  China may learn that lesson eventually.

If Mike were to come up with a definitive fix and served it to them in gold ink on a silver platter,I doubt any change  would be made. Hell, these are selling.   The saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" applies only to their business model, not the actual product anymore.

If that is the only failure incident, and the vehicle did not burn down to the chassis, they do not have a problem. If it is a common failure and they are a real company they will hear about it and can address in in future production runs.

Sometimes products from China are not fully engineered but copied from some other similar product built in that same factory by some other real company. That's why I was asking about approvals, but sometimes they copy those agency marks too. These days some approval marks use technology for stickers that are hard to copy.

When you fish from the bottom of the barrel sometimes you hook a turd instead of a fish.

JR

[jasonfinnigan]

I heard back for the "manufacturer" of this LED module, and their engineer came up with what I consider to be a nonsense failure mechanism for it burning out. He proposed that the RV's 12-volt converter (essentially a 120-volt AC to 12-volt DC power supply that charges the 12-volt lead-acid batteries) must have had a momentary diode failure that dumped 120-volts AC into the battery system and burned out the LED module in addition to shocking the RV owner. The failed power supply diode then fixed itself before damaging any other electronics or the main storage battery. And, of course, this occurred at the exact second the RV owner touched the light bezel.

Yeah, and Martians ate my homework... So I'm calling BS on his proposed failure mechanism. After making my doubts known to the president of the company, he agreed to send me several LED fixtures to see if I can blow them up with a static discharge.

Should be fun... 

And How is everything else on the RV fine? hmm..

[Mike Sokol]

And How is everything else on the RV fine? hmm..

Yes, that was the only electrical failure. Suspicious, isn't it.

I'm a huge proponent of using the logic of Occam's Razor to help determine failure mechanisms. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one, and highly complex theories a generally BS. As noted earlier, there's not a high likelihood that Martian's in a spaceship actually landed in my yard and ate my homework. More likely I just lost it or didn't do it at all. Yes, at times there's the perfect storm of problems that comes together. But that's pretty rare.

This same idea of simple explanations happens in the medical health field all the time. For instance, before Pasteur discovered that bacteria caused spoilage there were dozens of theories as to why things rotted. But once you understand bacteria and the fact that you can kill them with heat, then you understand the process of canning. However, there were illnesses that didn't seem to be caused by bacteria, which had to wait until the invention of the electron microscopes to discover viruses. And so it goes with most fails. You have to force yourself to stand back from the problem and see the big picture, then find the seemingly unimportant detail that turns out to be the lynchpin of the problem. That's the really fun part.   

[ProSoundWeb Community]