Hey Chuck!!!
How's it going there buddy??? Hope you're still busy!!! Yeah, that circuit board was toast when I opened that wire feeder up to diagnose & troubleshoot why it wasn't working properly anymore as I was the same person who set the feeder to run with their equipment, and made darn sure to emphasize to the customer not to use the wire feeder with the power source set up with the High frequency on at all... Now one would think that they would have gone out of their way to make sure of this, but sometimes you just cannot always count on your customers to follow your recommendations or your warnings and I'm sure you know what I'm talking about my friend! ;)
The sad part about it was that the reason they didn't avoid what caused the board to fail was the fact that they did not properly go over with a relatively new person the had employed who was working with this set up on a project in the shop... In other words, a classic case of bad decision making, yet they swallowed their pride and ordered a new board and we got the puppy working again by the end of the week... This was one of those happy endings, and I wish there were more of them instead of the more common cases where the customer would deny they did anything wrong, and insist on having the repairs covered under warranty regardless of the fact that they even admitted that their own mistake was the reason why the machine failed - Go figure huh??? Then when you offer to give them the part and labor for practically nothing just so they appreciate the fact that you want to continue providing services to them, they get all hot under the collar screaming how expensive the repair will be and that all I'm doing is taking advantage of their mistake for crying out loud!!!
Yeah buddy! I can go on and on with describing all sorts of calls I made when I was a tech rep for a welding distributor in NYC back in the day, but some of those memories are so messed up that I'd rather not even go and relive them because of the abuse I had to put up with from some of the customer base I had to interact with...
Anywho, It's always good to see you in here, and I hope things are well with you!!! I hope you don't mind me asking you this Chuck, but have you heard anything regarding that rig explosion that occurred a few weeks ago around your neck of the woods??? I figured you're probably someone who might know something about what's going on with that tragedy, and I hope you didn't lose anyone from that incident...
Well, here's to you my friend!!! Good to see you're still around old friend!!! Now don't you go off and work yourself to death ya hear??? ;)
Respectfully,
Henry